


II.  The Selkie's Lover

by twistedchick



Series: Life, Refracted [2]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Between Seasons/Series, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Disappearance(s), Dinosaurs, Episode Related, Multi, Multiple Universe, Rex - Freeform, alternate interpretation of canon, alternate universe-canon, gorgonopsid, life refracted, paleobiology, sex in a tree
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-01-26
Updated: 2010-01-26
Packaged: 2017-10-06 17:39:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 65,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/56176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twistedchick/pseuds/twistedchick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stephen's world is changed, three times over ten years, by luck, love and loss -- and every time, Helen and Nick are in the midst of it with him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	II.  The Selkie's Lover

The first time Stephen saw her, she was casually free-climbing a cliff in the Welsh mountains as if she were walking up the escalator at Harrod's.

"Who's that?" he asked Paul, who like him had stopped running to watch her.

"Dunno. She's good, isn't she?"

Stephen watched her foot slip off one slanting small outcrop. She stretched farther, brought the foot higher up, set it securely in place and kept going.

"Yeah." He took a sip of water and leaned forward to stretch the backs of his thighs. That last mile uphill had made him breathe harder than he'd expected. "So. Think you'll have any interesting classes this term?"

"There's one with Michaelson that looks interesting. And something with the new instructor, Farquhar, in evolutionary biogeography, whatever that is."

"Population distribution of extinct animals." He stretched his arms to loosen his shoulders and took a few steps in place; didn't want to cool down with another two miles to go. God, he was getting flabby if he couldn't run five miles without stopping. Too much target shooting, not enough running, makes Stephen out of breath. He caught himself thinking that it was a good thing he was only shooting at targets, and not at some large animal that might be likely to trample him if he didn't get it on the first shot. Unless he kept his running schedule this year he wouldn't be able to outrun a pug dog. "Why do you want it?"

Paul shrugged. "I'm thinking of switching to geology; more opportunities all over the place. You know there aren't enough grants to fund all the fossil digs, and too many of us leaving university to fill them." He fastened his water bottle back onto his belt. "If I know where the dinosaurs lived, as well as the rock formations, I might find more oil."

"Ah. You want to be wealthy."

"You say that like it's a bad thing. What's so great about evolutionary biology?"

"You get to travel a lot," he offered. As an undergraduate, and even before that for a couple of summers, he'd been on digs in Israel, Wyoming, Brazil and Russia, doing scut work, sifting the dirt for any sign of past life that someone else would identify.

"Yes, but oil geologists spend much more time in hotels, not bothies and shelters."

Stephen nodded. They turned and started the run downhill, over the old trails across the hills, back to the bed and breakfast. Only four more days of holiday before both of them had to be back at university, and he didn't want to miss a second of them.

* * *

She came to mind while he was in the shower later, letting the hot water dull some of the aches in his muscles. He was fine at running on the flat, but the hills were getting to him.

It was rare to see a woman climb with such assurance. He wondered what she thought about, what her interests were. Maybe she was a secretary from Bristol or Cardiff who liked to climb on weekends, or one of those Americans who showed up, every so often, determined to climb every 'name' peak within a month's holiday.

"Oi! You drowning up there?" It was Paul, leaning in the doorway. "I'm starved."

His stomach rumbled. "Me too. Which pub?"

"Cardiff Giant. I'll get us a table in the back."

"See you there."

The Cardiff Giant had decent shepherd's pie and chips, and the crowd at the bar watching football on the telly was only moderately loud. The berry tart after wasn't bad, either, especially with Irish cider. He joked with Paul, and played darts, and kept half an eye on the door but if the woman climber ever showed up, he missed her.

* * *

When the next term at Central Metropolitan University started, Stephen had a Monday and Wednesday lecture by Professor Cutter on the evolution of mammals, and one with Professor Torvoldson on paleobotany, on the same schedule. His other major class of the term was the biogeography class on Tuesdays and Thursdays with Farquhar, where he planned to sit in the back of the lecture hall so he could escape if it was a total bore. Fridays were set aside for labs and tutorials, some of which overlapped into Saturdays, but not so much that he'd have to cut back on running.

He'd planned to take notes for half the class and use the rest to review statistical theory, which he knew he'd need for the classes he wanted next term. That plan fell away when he looked across over the heads in the front and recognized the strong shoulders and arm muscles of the woman climber in the instructor. She turned away from the whiteboard, where she'd written her name in large letters along with the course designation code, her office hours and the titles and authors of the textbooks.

"Good morning," she began in a brisk tone. "I'm Helen Farquhar, and this is Elements of Evolutionary Biogeography. Is everyone in the room supposed to be here? If you are here by mistake and can't stand it another minute, come up now; if not, see me afterward to sort out paperwork."

His pen fell out of his fingers, and he slid down sideways in his seat to pick it up again, never looking away from her for a second. Her eyes were dark brown, and she let her gaze cross the room slowly, as if she could take it all in at once, as if it were vital for her to be able to identify every face, every chair, every light fixture. Her hair was just touching her shoulders, slightly flyaway, as if she brought her own breeze with her. _Ridiculous. You're not in one of Veronica's Mills and Boon romances._ He straightened in his chair; her eyes fixed on him and the intensity of her gaze made his breath stop for a moment.__

She continued to review office hours, required texts, grading and projects for a few minutes, then moved directly into an overview of how the distribution of fauna changed over time depending on climate and ecology. Her voice was relatively deep for a woman, and she spoke authoritatively. When a student in front asked a question her reply was factual but not overwhelmingly detailed; she didn't flood them with information but let it trickle out gradually, incrementally building a sense of the subject. And she didn't seem to make assumptions about what they knew at this point. After last year, when he'd felt overwhelmed for the first couple of weeks of every course, he appreciated that.

When he read his notes afterward, they were far more fragmentary than usual, closer to outlines than to his usual thorough review. It didn't matter. He remembered every word she'd said, and filled in the rest while he was sitting in the library later.

* * *

Cutter's class on mammalian evolution interested him more than he expected. He'd tended to think that after all the BBC specials, the books Richard Leakey had written and the other things he'd already read or seen that he'd be able to consider this an easy class. Not so. Cutter had a habit of wandering down abstruse avenues of thought, pursuing ideas, asking for students' thoughts, and then turning the whole thing around again on them. He had to stay on his toes with Cutter; he had to stay awake and think about the differences between fossils and what they indicated about the way the world looked at the time those creatures were alive.

* * *

"Everything that is in a creature's world, everything that creature does, affects its growth and the way it lives." Cutter picked up one of several casts of femurs that lay on the lecture table in front of them. "What's different about this one?"

"It's smaller," said one of the women.

"The marks on the bone show that it belonged to someone who had strong muscles," said another student.

"What sort of muscles? Good for what?" Cutter picked up another femur and handed the two casts to students in the front row to examine and pass around. "What's the difference between these?"

"The second one comes from a chimpanzee," Stephen said.

"Not quite, but you're on the right track." Cutter smiled at him. "Go with it."

"The first one is more modern, the second is older." He looked again at the bones, tilted them in his hands so that the ball at the hip was at the same height for both. "And the difference in the angle of the muscles on the bone and how they're attached indicates that the older one probably didn't walk upright all the time."

"Good!" Cutter said. "Pass those along and look at these. What do you see here?"

Cutter was engaging and fascinating in the classroom, talking about his favorite topics, but outside it at times he seemed as dour as Stephen's grandfather on a wet day. Not unfriendly, nor uncivil, but a man of few words and great privacy. He'd answer any question as long as it wasn't personal, or so it seemed.

Still, he wasn't completely unapproachable. Stephen was at the Dog and Bone one evening, leaning against the bar casually watching the football on the telly, when a couple of postgraduates he recognized from the department came in with Cutter, all three of them in full academic cry over an article someone had published. They took over the booth in the back corner, and gradually gathered a crowd of students listening to the informal debate. When a couple left a table vacant he took a chair and went to listen himself, on the edge of the crowd of what had, by then, turned into an impromptu seminar that posed Richard Leakey against Donald Johanson, and threw in comments about _Sinanthropus pekinensis_ and _Homo erectus_, and _Homo floresiensis_ for good measure.

About an hour into the discussion someone had the temerity to say, "Wait a minute, professor, what about –" and hand Cutter some photocopied pages.

Cutter glanced at them briefly. "Ah, well, what can you expect? Pay no mind to the man behind the curtain here." And the postgraduates started laughing, and handing around the photocopies of the two journal articles that had started the discussion, the one from a dozen years earlier with the name of the former Paleobiology department head on it, followed by the names of three postgraduate students, and the second a more recent publication partly refuting the first one. The one name on both papers was that of Nicholas Cutter.

The crowd broke up, but he hung around long enough to find a corner where he could review notes for Farquhar's next class while he ate a burger. In the next booth a few students were still talking about the earlier discussion. "But he's not married, is he?" one of them asked. "Does he date?"

"Cutter? Are you kidding?" another woman said. "You just heard his small talk, that last hour or so."

"If that was small talk, maybe he's gay."

"No," a third voice added. "I heard he has a girlfriend, but she lives somewhere else and visits."

"Could be. He doesn't flirt with any of us, does he? Not like Geordie Arbuthnot over in Botany."

"Ew," the other two said.

He managed to tune out the rest of their conversation.

* * *

It wasn't a crush, he told himself, halfway through the term. He'd never actually met Farquhar to speak to; he'd only listened to her talk passionately about her topic twice a week. He liked confident women, especially confident women with dark eyes and that dark sweep of hair. Besides, he was dating Cheryl, staying at her place whenever their schedules coincided. She was a literature major, with so many books to read over the course of the term that she was happy just to be leaning up against him on the couch, muttering her way through historic British literature as he wrestled with a paper for Cutter on early primates or the lab notes from Torvaldson on ferns.

As it turned out, the Farquhar class required the steadiest amount of work, with short research papers every week that students retrieved from her office the following Monday before her lecture. So far, his grades had been high, but he'd put in a lot of work to get them there. He didn't mind working on what interested him. The paper just before midterm break weekend was more speculative than usual, using modern migratory bird flight paths as a hypothesis for tracking the possible migrations of _Archaeopteryx_ and other early transitional flying reptiles-not-quite-birds-yet, and he wondered how it would go.

* * *

He reached campus late, delayed by a faulty alarm clock and rain slowing his walk, and decided to pick up his graded paper after the lecture instead of before. But as he slid into his usual back-of-the-hall seat he noticed that she wasn't at the front setting up her materials. Instead of striding down the stairs next to his seat at the end of the row as she usually did, she limped into the lecture hall from a side door, leaning on a wooden cane, her right foot in a plastic walking cast. It didn't stop her from pacing as usual while she answered questions, drew migration patterns on the whiteboard, or challenged the students to think more deeply and broadly about the subject.

But she chose to climb the stairs when she left, rather than leaving in the way she'd entered. The hallway outside was the shortest route to her office, he realized, but even as the thought crossed his mind he saw the determination in her expression: she would not let a flight of stairs keep her from what she wanted, no matter what her foot felt like. When she reached the top step and paused for a moment before leaning on the door's crash bar, her balance wobbled and the bookbag over her shoulder tilted. A small leather-bound notebook dropped to the floor. He picked it up to hand back to her.

"Thanks." She leaned her hip against the doorframe, tucked the notebook back into her bag, and gave him an appraising glance. Up one step from him, her eyes were in line with his own. "You're Mr. Hart, right? Your last paper was excellent. Have you considered taking my special topics class next term?"

"I hadn't decided yet." Why did he feel as if he were stammering? "I was considering Professor Torvaldson's class on cladistics and the evolutionary physiology consortium."

"And you need to complete a well-rounded distribution for the undergraduate degree, I realize." She nodded, her mouth curling at the corner, perhaps in acknowledgement of how mundane the conversation was. She'd undoubtedly had nearly the same discussion with every other student this week, as class requests were due Friday. "What else do you want to study?"

His mouth felt dry. "I'd really like to take Professor Cutter's class on advanced excavation and field work, which is postgraduate level, if he'll have me; besides that, Wisner's phylogenetics class, whenever it's offered. Probably next year."

She tilted her head as she peered at him, as if she were trying to fit him into a classification system. He wondered what sort of creature she'd list him as.

"Did you test out of the basic field work class?"

"I was told I'd done enough digs to go for the next level." He rattled off a quick resumé of his summer digs during secondary school, when he'd done anything he could to get on a site, and early last summer, when he'd gotten in on a University of Bristol dig at the last minute after they'd run short of eligible students.

"Good for you. Take the special topics class in third year, then; I'll be kind if you're delayed with travel from wherever Professor Cutter's taking his field methods class."

He nodded as he held the door open for her. "What happened to your foot?"

"Came down wrong when I was rock-scrambling. It's a clean break, it'll heal." She smiled at him, and he smiled back. "Thanks for the help."

The impact of her gaze had him walking into walls the rest of the day.

* * *

Maybe it was because he and Cheryl had gone their separate ways a week earlier, and his bed still felt a little too cold and empty on chilly December mornings. Maybe it was the season, though he wasn't noticeably religious; when his family wanted him to show up for something at the church he did what they asked, because it was easier than not. Maybe it was just that it was the end of term, and the seasonal change coincided with the frenzy of studying and exams and final papers finally turned in, so that by the time of the department holiday party he was feeling an inner ache he couldn't quantify and couldn't dismiss by running an extra mile or so in the crisp, frosty air.

Whatever the cause, he was feeling more sensitive to the presence of others than usual, in ways he apparently couldn't avoid but had to endure for however long they lasted. If he had been at home, feeling like this, he would have immersed himself in running, or target shooting – he had qualified for the Olympic team the previous year as an alternate but had never been called upon to compete – or he would have pried his brother out of the pharmacy and they could have gone up into the hills to track game. Here, Paul had already left for the break, so he had nobody to go beat hell out of a squash ball with him, not that he thought it'd help.

None of it worked, as far as getting him out of the doldrums. After a day spent wandering in the hills, where he seemed to be the only living creature stupid enough to be out in the wind and cold, he decided on a whim to stop by his department's holiday party because it was reputed to have better drinks than any of the locals.

He could hear the sound of voices before he reached Professor Torvoldson's house. Someone had pinned a paper to the door -- _Come in!_ \-- so he did, wrapped his coat and scarf around the last available hanger in the closet, and was on his way into the large drawing room on the right when he paused before the open door of a small library on the left. It had bookshelves built in, floor to ceiling, a baby grand piano, a desk and two old oversized leather couches. And on the couch opposite the door Helen Farquhar was laughing at some postgraduate student's joke, her head thrown back, leaning back against Professor Cutter's shoulder in a way that he hadn't seen the standoffish Cutter allow from anyone else, male or female. Was she Cutter's mysterious and hypothetical girlfriend? Apparently so.

Not that Stephen cared, either way. His own preferences were mutable; unfortunately, as Cheryl had complained, he was too busy to indulge them most of the time. So, what did it matter?

The sight of her laughing jolted him just as seeing her scaling the cliff had done, months earlier. For half a minute he stood like a tree in the doorway until some students elbowed him aside in order to bring in the steaming bowl of mulled wine to set on a heavy felt pad on the desk. He moved aside with good grace and went to get a glass punch cup of hot wine and listen to Mitchell and Crewe trying to talk a few others into carol singing later.

"Mr. Hart? Or should I call you Stephen now, since we're being informal here?" She was standing next to his elbow. He turned swiftly, only narrowly managing not to spill his cup.

"Please, call me Stephen."

She smiled at him, her eyes like dark topaz in the light, and turned away to put a hand on Professor Cutter's arm. "Nick, this is Stephen Hart, the student I told you about. I'm trying to persuade him to take my class next term instead of in his third year but he wants to study with you."

"No reason he can't study with both of us," Nick Cutter said. He put out a hand to shake, and Stephen shook it automatically as they moved aside from the crowd around the piano, who were starting to plunk out random notes. "You're the one in my mammals class who knows what to look for on bones, I recall." From Cutter, this was practically effusive. Stephen started to say something, he never knew afterward what, when Cutter continued, "Helen's been good enough to show me some of your work in her class, also, and she mentioned that you've had a bit of on-site experience." Cutter glanced at the crowd around the piano, which was growing louder on the fourth verse of Good King Wenceslas, and drew them both aside. "Thing is, I was wondering if you might be interested in a part-time job. I'll be in need of an assistant next term."

His eyebrows rose. "Oh?" Cutter wasn't the only brief-spoken Scot in the room. "What sort of assistant?"

"Sort of an assistant site manager." Cutter shook his head at the din and they went into the smaller room behind the library, apparently an office. "You've done orienteering and survival training, and you're a notable marksman, from what I understand. Olympic alternate, I believe? I need someone with a broad range of skills to check out potential digs for me, help set up camp, and be the general go-to guy so that I can get on with the teaching. "

It struck him as odd that Cutter would cite his marksmanship as something interesting. He had a good eye for a target, and he'd gotten the training and experience and qualified for the Olympic team, but he hadn't been called to the last Games. Perhaps he'd make it to the next ones. Guns were such a difficult issue in Britain, with law enforcement always crying for more regulation but the hunters and sharpshooters insisting on ancient rights. He was licensed as a sharpshooter, a target shooter, not to carry a weapon for self-defense; that wasn't in his training.

"Are you looking for an assistant or a bodyguard? I thought you had a lab assistant already."

"No, I don't need a bodyguard," Cutter said, chuckling. "Paleontology isn't all that exciting these days. But target shooting and orienteering give you different ways of looking at a location than other people." He took a sip of the mulled wine and made a face. "Too much cloves. Helen, I've no right to ask, but would you –"

"Lager or stout?" She smiled at them both and turned toward the next room.

"Stout, thanks." Cutter watched her leave, then turned back to Stephen. "Unfortunately, my lab assistant is going to be taking a year off because of some family issues – her father died, to start with, and there are younger siblings – and so I'm short one staff position for the next term, possibly longer. Now, I can't offer you as much as I could her, because you're not postgraduate yet, but I can make sure you get something, and there'll be much more opportunity for you to improve your excavation and site management skills out there onsite than in a classroom."

Helen handed Nick a glass of stout and took back the cup of mulled wine."You're doing a terrible job of explaining what you told me," Helen said.

"Yeah, I know," Cutter said in an apologetic tone. He cast about the room until he found a particular bookshelf, where he pulled down a packet of Ordinance Survey maps that he opened on the desk. "See, I've gotten permission to dig here —" he pointed at one map "— and alternatively here –" he flipped to another and pointed again. "I haven't worked at either site before, and I won't have the time to go and make sure everything's set up properly. I could use someone with your skill set who's also had experience on site, who's knowledgeable about the work, to go there ahead of time. Look around, determine where the camp should be set up so we don't end up finding the best fossils under our tents and so on. Site management, so to speak. Would you be interested?"

Stephen nodded slowly. He hadn't considered this use for his ability to find sight lines or evaluate the ground while tracking, but it made sense.

"As I said, I can't pay you much at all for this, but I can try to make things easier with your other professors in terms of deadlines and so on. Helen's already onboard with it, so to speak, and I'll take it on myself to speak to the others whenever your classes are set."

"That's not a problem. The money, I mean," Stephen said. Now he was the one stumbling over his words. "It'll help, don't get me wrong; I can use the help. I'd like this, a lot. Thank you, professor."

"Call me Nick, Stephen. I've got a feeling we're going to be seeing a lot of each other."

Helen beamed at them both as if she'd just invented them from clay and blown the breath of life into them.

_Whoa. Where did that imagery come from? That was weird._ Stephen sipped his wassail, which tasted of red wine, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, clove and probably other things as well. _Cheryl would have told him, if she were still around._ Maybe that image had come to him because of the season; he couldn't think of any other reason. He'd taken the courses on mythology and its cultural applications as an undergrad, and none of the creation goddesses he could recall reminded him of her at all.

"Oy! Hart, get in here. Nobody knows the third verse of the Coventry Carol."

"Does it have a third verse?" Stephen said, and with an apologetic smile at Cutter (whom he couldn't quite think of as Nick yet) and Helen, he went back into the other room.

* * *

"I've got a job," he said over eggs and sausage one morning during the between-terms holidays.

"A job?" his mother inquired. "Are you sure you'll have time for your studies?"

"Site manager for paleobiology digs, for one of the professors. It counts toward classes." He reached for the toast.

"And it pays, too? You lucky dog," Veronica said as she picked up the marmalade.

"Not as much as if I were postgraduate, but it pays something."

"Well, that's good. Keep you out of trouble," his father said.

He and Veronica exchanged looks. "As if," she muttered under her breath.

He took the last slice of toast, in response. "You're going to – where, Heidelberg? – this term?"

Veronica kicked him under the table, but not very hard.

* * *

When he returned in January, he found a pile of papers an inch thick in his departmental mailbox, with a sticky note on top:

> These are all what not to do. Learn from them.
> 
> Cutter  
> 

Stephen took them home, where he spread them out on the largest table in the flat. They were accounts – some published, some in photocopied notes – from the log books of digs that had gone wrong, some laughably, some horribly. Some digs had been set up so that the workers' tents were in flood zones while the dig itself was above high water. Some had had problems with illness from badly organized hygiene, and some from poorly stored food. Some had organizational foul-ups, or personnel difficulties, or problems with local politics.

He started to run a list on a pad next to him as he read, guessing early in each account what its problems would be and how they could be solved or not. By the next day he had reached the point where he was not only guessing right every time, but could name the resources the hapless dig had missed, squandered or ignored. He stopped in that afternoon to see Cutter during office hours.

Cutter was sitting at his desk, one hand holding open a thick-bound professional journal, the other wrapped around a coffee mug. He looked up. "You're a fast reader. You haven't had that pile for two days."

"Where's the dig going to be?"

"Here." Cutter let the journal close and pulled out an ordinance survey map, which he flipped open. "We have the first choice of location; another university put in for the same area but we got in first. What do you think?"

Stephen studied the map for a moment. "I'd have to see it in person to be sure, but I'd want to set up the camp there."

"Why?" Cutter sat back on the chair, watching him.

He opened his notebook and referred to it as he pointed at the map, his finger moving as he spoke. "The water supply is here and here; latrines will have to be over there, if there aren't facilities set up. Does the university provide portapotties? If not, where can we rent them? I'm not about to dig latrines at a fossil site where someone may want to excavate later on."

"Latrine-digging isn't in your job description," Cutter said, watching him. "Go on."

His finger swept across the map. "We can set up showers over there, if we want; the river's too cold this early for bathing, and with a mixed group – I'm assuming you're bringing a gender-mixed crowd – there are problems with it anyhow." He smiled; one of the reports had gone into detail on a legal dispute over river bathing that had included arguments on both 'public lewdness' and 'environmental degradation' from shampoo in the water. "Some companies that will rent trailers with self-enclosed shower facilities short-term for a modest price to construction sites and so on; if there's a budget for that kind of thing it could go over there, by the road where it could be serviced without disrupting the work."

He flipped to the next page of his notebook and opened the detail map of the site that he'd drawn. "The tents will have to be here, where the ground is level, but well above the flood plain. From the geological maps, I expect you're looking at this bit of rock that should have Permian and early Jurassic fossils. Depending on what you think is there, you could work on the exposed rock in the hillside there, or downhill from it by the bank of the stream, and you shouldn't run into interference from the Roman archeological dig that I think is located about a mile further downstream. They're on the other side of the river, anyway."

When he looked up, Cutter was smiling at him. "I must remember to tell Helen that she found me the right man for the job."

* * *

He hadn't expected to like Cutter as much as he did. The man tended toward talkative rather than dour, but he could drop an invisible wall of reserve the size of the Grampians between himself and others at any time. He was just as willing to tell you at length how wrong you were as to ignore you altogether if he were thinking of something else. But when Cutter found an idea that charmed him, he pursued it like a pack of foxhounds on the first day of hunting season, as if nothing else in the world mattered.

Often as not, he found, his job included bringing Cutter down to earth, offering alternatives, suggesting possibilities and coming out with the occasional statement that all but said "you're crazy." And when he did, Cutter would have that same smile on his face, and launch off in another direction with a different interpretation that they would hash out together.

When they did this at Cutter's house over dinner, they often didn't rise from the table until midnight. Stephen stayed in the spare room and they continued the discussion over breakfast. He got into the habit of hauling his coursework with him and asking questions about bits of the reading that weren't clear, or alternate ways of thinking about some of the more accepted tenets of the discipline.

It was exhilarating to find someone whom he could talk with, brainstorm with, exchange ideas with, without the filters he put on his discussions with his family and his mates. He knew many people other than his family regarded him as reticent or unfeeling, but that was a smoke screen he'd deliberately created in order to maintain his calm demeanor during shooting competitions. With Cutter there was no competition, no need to hide his emotions, his joy in the discussions, his pleasure in the growing friendship between them that he saw echoed in Cutter's equal openness.

* * *

The first night of the dig, instead of the light rain that had been predicted, the rain steadily increased to a downpour – which would have been fine if Stephen's old tent, faithful for a hundred backpacking trips, had not decided that this was the time to split a seam. He woke up with his feet and the lower half of his sleeping bag soaked. Fortunately, the tent was so small that the supplies and equipment (normally the province of the site manager) had been put into a two-man tent off to the side from and slightly uphill from what felt as if it were rapidly becoming a pond around his legs.

He pulled a damp plastic poncho around himself, rubbed his feet dry on the only partly damp towel draped over his backpack near his head, stuck his feet into his boots, which had sat in water but were dry inside, and splashed his way over to Cutter's tent.

"Cutter. Professor Cutter--"

"Wha?"

"It's Stephen Hart. Can I come in?"

The tent flap moved aside. Cutter blinked at him standing there. "Oh, aye, come in out of the rain, Stephen." He moved aside hurriedly to let Stephen in. "God, you look half-drowned."

"Tent collapsed." He was shaking, despite the heavy long underwear he'd worn to sleep in. They were far enough up in the Highlands that his extra-warm black New Zealander woolies had seemed appropriate. Now they were all that kept him from feeling frozen as well as drenched. Wool retains body heat when wet, he kept reminding himself, even if it wicked up the rain like a bastard.

Cutter shook his head as he dug through his supplies. "Here's a towel, and a spare set of woolies till yours dry. Socks, too. We're not quite the same size but they shouldn't be too far off. And you'll need somewhere to sleep tonight, of course." He tossed the towel to Stephen, and the dry woolies, and pulled out a couple of heavy blankets. "You take the cot there; I'll kip here tonight and we'll rescue your things in the morning."

"I can't put you out of your bed." Stephen had rubbed himself down quickly as he peeled off the wet black woolies. The green ones he'd been handed were a little short but not so bad a fit; Cutter was stockier than he was but in good shape considering that he wasn't a runner.

"Nonsense. I can sleep anywhere, the floor's dry in here, I've a spare foam underpad and the blankets -- and you need to get warm. Get you into the sleeping bag and I'll curl up over here and catch a few hours more, and it'll be fine." Cutter grinned at him. "It's all right. Don't make me shift into mother hen mode."

"God, no." Stephen shook his head, still wrapped in the towel, and climbed into the sleeping bag. Oh, body warmth! Warm feet! He pulled the towel off his head, draped it over the corner of the cot and curled himself into the sleeping bag, asleep almost before he had it pulled up to his ears.

He spent his morning rescuing his gear, stringing a line between two trees near the central campfire, draping his sleeping bag on the line and propping it with several sticks in the hope that it might drip out most of the water and start to dry without extinguishing the fire. He would much rather have been working on the dig's survey work, but as he glanced across at Cutter directing the students in measuring and making preliminary marks to indicate where they would work, and evaluating the location as a whole, he got back a warm smile that made him feel he wasn't completely a waste of time.

The old backpacking tent was fucked, no argument; the material itself had shredded in two places as well as the thread on the main seam giving way. He wouldn't be able to recycle it into anything more than the smallest tarp, if that. Well, when he next phoned home and they asked how he'd been, if he mentioned the collapsed tent he'd probably find a replacement under the tree at Christmas. He smiled to himself, thinking about that, as he poked another stick under the sleeping bag and restocked the fire. He could all but hear them:

"Oh, Stephen, what have you done to yourself now?" That was Veronica all over.

His mother would take the phone away from her. "Stephen, dear, what happened? Are you all right? Veronica, stop making those faces right now; if your face froze no one would ever look at you again. Stephen, please, go on."

And his father would get on the extention upstairs. "All right, son, what will it cost?"

He would say, "It's not that big a deal. The old tent shredded and left me up to my hips in water in a rainstorm."

"Is that all? Veronica made it sound as if you were in dire need."

"Only in dire need of a new tent."

He could almost hear the shrug over the phone. "Price them out for me and give me some options."

"I can buy my own tent, you know. Working. Paycheck. Besides, this was Dermot's old one."

"That rag?" His mother again. "I'm amazed it held up this long while you're chasing fossils around the hills." No matter what he said, she seemed to persist in thinking that fossils were some sort of shy, rare wild beasts that might follow him home and cry on his doorstep if he weren't careful. "You haven't caught a cold, have you? Your aunt Cora has such a head cold –" And the conversation would turn toward matters Scottish and family instead of his current mishaps south of the Border.

He smiled as he poked at the fire. It didn't matter that his family had no idea what he was studying, or any interest in anything older than the last century, when their house was built. His father the banker liked to hike over the hills with the dogs, carrying a shotgun, though he couldn't hit the broad side of a barn unless he were standing an arm's length away from it. His mother, second daughter of a prosperous farmer, was a former model turned fashion designer, with a small shop in Perth that tempted fashionable women away from the Royal Mile. His brother Dermot, ten years older, was a pharmacist who organized youth soccer tournaments in his spare time, but who had also taught him to stalk and track game over rough country and encouraged his fossil collecting from the time he could recognize a brachiopod imprint in the collapsed rock by a river. And his kid sister Veronica was in her first year at Cambridge, working toward a degree in modern languages.

As a group they had not a thing in common intellectually, but it didn't matter. They were family; he could be himself with them. He just couldn't talk about what he found most interesting.

He had finished wringing out his wet socks and shirts and draping them over bushes and rocks in the uncertain sunshine and was sitting on a rock sorting through what remained of his toiletries kit when Cutter wandered over to the fire and stood there a while, staring at the arrangement of wet things.

"Y'know, that bag of yours makes a hell of a good sponge," Cutter said, interrupting his thoughts. "You going into town today?"

"Hadn't planned on it, but I could."

Cutter handed him a couple of 50-pound notes. "Get yourself to the camping goods store on the square and replace whatever needs it from your gear."

Stephen tried to hand it back. "It's not necessary. I'll get it dry by evening."

"That?" Cutter snorted. "Not all the hot air in Whitehall could dry it by evening. Call it an advance on your paycheck. You can stand me a Guinness at a pub when we get back, if you like."

"It's really not necessary." But the sleeping bag was still steadily dripping liter after liter of water onto the ground, and the water was flowing steadily under the wood on the fire, making the embers hiss.

"Had you thought that I might want to sleep in my own bed tonight? And that the weather report says we're due to go a few degrees colder than the blankets on the floor will protect either of us from?"

"When you put it that way –"

"You don't have to get yourself another tent right now; there's plenty of room in my tent for you. Just get yourself a sleeping bag, all right? I think there's a spare camp cot in the departmental luggage we brought; I'll dig it out for you. Not as comfortable as an air mattress, but it won't float away, either."

Stephen looked over at where his tent had been; the entire area was covered in water. "All right." He nodded toward the undergrads. "What's the plan for lunch?"

"Don't trouble yourself. We can all make sandwiches; the bread didn't get soggy at all. But if you can come up with something hot for dinner, that'd be fine. And tomorrow you can oversee the dig and I'll do the cooking in the evening."

"But – " Stephen gulped.

"We're letting the site dry out a bit first. No sense trying to excavate coherent layers if it all slops together. But I've every confidence that you can distinguish bone from rock and the occasional bit of Roman-era pottery from both of them, " Cutter's voice dropped, "which is more than I suspect young Mr. Benton over there can do."

"Ah. Right."

"After lunch, we're going to walk up toward the ridgeline on the old right-of-way to see if they can identify and distinguish the visible strata and the kinds of fossils that might be in them. You can come if you like, or head into town."

Stephen smiled his thanks. "I'll do the supply run then. Wouldn't hurt to have something better than basic spaghetti for dinner." He glanced up at the mountain. "Unless there's something new besides that bit of shale sticking out halfway up."

Cutter grinned. "Good man. I knew I had the right assistant."

* * *

From then on they shared a tent on site, and made it the official HQ for whatever work they were doing. Students came in and out whenever the flaps were tied back during the day, but in the evening the two of them often continued whatever discussion had started over dinner late into the night, whether around the campfire or in the tent during inclement weather. Sometimes they read to each other from papers or books one or the other had brought along, and sometimes they just talked. And somewhere, in the long discussions, Cutter had become Nick.

Dermot surprised him with a new tent for his birthday the next month, though it was theoretically from the whole family; he hadn't had time to find one, in between work and studies. The tent came in very handy when Helen came along for a weekend with some postgraduate students on the third weekend at the dig. Helen theoretically had her own one-man tent, and may have been in it in the morning, but late at night she was with Nick in his tent. Stephen shared his new two-man expedition-light tent with the supplies, and four graduate students slept in two tents borrowed from the department.

And it was just as well that he'd put a few pairs of earplugs in his pack, to drop discreetly into the grad students' tent. Helen wasn't particularly quiet in the throes of passion, even when she was trying for discretion, and neither was Nick.

He smiled and pushed the earplugs into his ears. He didn't mind the sounds, he thought as he adjusted himself inside his sleeping bag, but he figured they would prefer their privacy. Besides, he needed his sleep.

* * *

"I'm glad you two get on so well," Helen said. She had caught up with him on the sidewalk between the lecture hall in the new building and Cutter's office in the not-quite-as-new one. "Are you busy on the 23rd?"

Stephen cast his mind through his schedule; that was a week from Friday, the last day of term before the winter holidays. "What time?"

"Two p.m. at the registry office. Nick and I are getting married."

"Congratulations," he said, meaning it, as they reached the office.

Nick looked up as they came in. "So, did you ask him?"

"Ask me?"

"To be best man for our wedding."

Stephen blinked. "Not exactly, but the answer is yes."

"Splendid!" Nick looked overjoyed. "Don't worry about renting a cutaway or anything like that; this is a low-key event."

"You keep saying that and I'll show up in my safari shirt," Helen said lightly, leaning in to kiss Nick.

"You'd look good in anything you want to wear, my dear, and you know it."

"So," Stephen said. "I suppose the bachelor party is on? It's short notice but I can probably find a dancer or two in the School of Dance or a first-year at RADA."

Helen frowned dramatically. "It's not fair, you know. I don't get one."

"I thought you and Carlotta were going out to find the dress," Nick said. "Doesn't that count?"

"It could, I suppose." She turned to Stephen. "Carlotta's my sister. I have no idea if you'll like her or not, but she's the maid of honor."

"Is she like you?"

Helen rolled her eyes. "She's three years younger, works for a travel agency and reads _The Tattler_."

Stephen smiled at her. "I'm not sure I'd be ready for two Helen Farquhars in the same room."

"We're going to Brazil for the honeymoon, back in January," Nick told him. "There's an excavation where they're working on ground sloths; they've found something extraordinary, possibly a new species of giant ground sloth, and I've been invited in."

"You're going on a dig on your honeymoon?" Stephen's eyebrows rose. "Isn't that a little extreme?"

"Oh, we're going to spend some time on a beach in the Caribbean as well," Helen told him. "It's clothing-optional, though I do plan to pack good footwear; coral isn't kind to the feet."

Stephen's eyebrows stayed up as he saw Nick blushing ever so slightly. "Clothing-optional? Take the sun cream."

"To get back to the important things," Nick said in an attempt to recover control of the conversation, "we'll be gone a while. You can manage things until I get back, right? There's the cataloging to oversee, and the paper we were writing together for the journal –"

"I'll take care of it. Don't worry."

"I think I'd better pack plenty of sun cream for you," Helen said, her eyes on Nick. "You don't turn brown the way I do. In fact, it doesn't even take sunshine to make you go a bit red." And they both broke out laughing.

Seeing them both so happy gave him a warm glow of his own, as if someone had lit a small campfire in the region of his heart.

And the glow persisted as he watched them go through the registry-office ceremony. Nick seemed almost ghostly pale with nerves, his hands shaking so that Stephen had to adjust his tie for him. Helen looked radiant in a long green dress of fine-spun wool that seemed to have a glow of its own and to be from no particular time period; Stephen took mental notes on the style so he could describe it to his mother later.

If Helen reminded Stephen of a portrait in oils, her sister Carlotta, who wore a tea-length blue dress with a short jacket, reminded him of a watercolor sketch for the portrait: similar but paler and without the depth. She leaned toward him as they sat in the restaurant later, watching Nick and Helen on the dance floor, and said, "They look good together, don't they?"

He nodded. He felt pleasantly buzzed from the wine with dinner. "What makes her dress shimmer under the lights?"

"It's a blend, silk and wool. She said she wanted something she could wear later on, if she wished."

"It looks good."

Nick and Helen were doing something like a fox trot or a non-bouncy polka, making fast turns, and she was laughing with her head thrown back. She had let her hair grow long for a year, and it floated down her back. Nick was laughing too, and smiling with such joy.

"Come on," Stephen said, holding out a hand. "There's room on that dance floor." Carlotta put her hand in his and they moved out onto the floor. She danced well, and they stayed on the floor for two songs before Nick smiled at him and they exchanged partners, Nick whirling off with Carlotta and he with Helen.

"Thanks for being with us today. It means a lot," Helen said quietly. "I don' t have a lot of real friends at the university; you know how it is with instructors. I'm glad you're one of them."

He did know how it was with instructors; a year here, a year there, and unless you were going to be around for a while, a lot of people didn't want to invest the time to get to know you. He had run into the same thing the first year as Nick's assistant, but now that he'd been in the position more than two terms people were starting to warm up a little.

"You look beautiful," he told her as they danced.

"Thank you," she said. At this distance her eyes had green and gold flecks, deep in the brown. His heart beat a little harder and he whirled her around the floor until he handed her back to Nick.

When Nick and Helen left, half an hour later, he took Carlotta to dinner and listened to her tell him all about the difficulties the Tourism Board had created in the business even though it catered to the nobility and royalty, made sure she got a taxi to her hotel, and went home alone, still thinking about watching the newlyweds dancing.

* * *

Helen and Nick married were much like Helen and Nick engaged, except that they went home to Nick's house together in the evening. Helen kept trying to redecorate around him, which didn't work and made him laugh, though she managed to get new curtains all around and to update the kitchen from its early-forties ambiance. Stephen, taller than either of them thanks to a late growth spurt, was called in often as not to help install curtain rods, paint ceilings and do other things that were helped by a little extra arm length or height.

And sometimes when Stephen had been buried in academia for too long and needed a break, and Nick was busy, Helen came along. They walked, talked, asked each other questions, tested ideas, refuted hypotheses, questioned everything. It was a relationship like none other he'd ever known. Helen treated him as an equal and expected him to keep up with her, no matter what she was doing or thinking.

"We have to keep Stephen here after he graduates," Helen told Nick as the three of them sat around the dining-room table after dinner one night.

"I agree." Nick turned to Stephen, who sat with his jaw dropped a bit in surprise. "I've been thinking about this idea of yours about island biogeography in the last ice age, and I was wondering if you'd like to write a paper with me about it; it's a topic I've been interested in for some time. And maybe stay on here as my postgraduate student, instead of going somewhere else. I know it's not a large department, but you've shown that you're capable of doing excellent work, and I think you'd be an asset to the department. And I'd like to keep working with you. What do you say?"

"Um. I'm …" For one of the few times in his life he was completely bereft of words. "Yes."

"Then it's settled, as far as I'm concerned." Nick reached for Stephen's plate and cut him another slice of mince pie. "You'd better eat something or else close your mouth, you'll catch flies."

"Are you sure?" He'd considered the University of Bristol, which had a very strong program that he was sure he'd qualify for, but at heart he didn't want to leave where he was, not as long as he was still learning.

"If I wasna sure I wouldna say it." Nick's Scots burr thickened a bit, as it did whenever he spoke with absolute sincerity, as it had at the wedding.

It seemed to Stephen as if he could feel the rasp of that burr all the way down to his bones as he started in on the mince pie.

* * *

He blazed through his comprehensive final examinations, got a first, went home for the family celebration, took off backpacking through the French Alps for a break, and to clear his head, and was back again the next term. As recognition of his achievement, he took the money his family had given him as a graduation gift and put it into furnishing a better flat, nearer the campus but in an area between the park and the village's better suburbs, within easy distance of the university as a whole. And it was his alone, no roommates, no housemates.

He had his privacy, the blessed quiet that meant he was on his own without roommates or siblings, and it was glorious.

Once he'd settled in, he had Nick and Helen over for dinner one evening. The talk and the wine were better than his version of his mother's favorite casserole recipe, but it didn't matter. He'd finally been able to reciprocate in a small way the kindness they'd shown him.

And now to work again, studying to learn more about something he loved and then working in the lab and arguing through theories and hypotheses with Nick. One year of classes on advanced research methods, studies on systematics, phylogenetics and cladistics and the ways ecologies had found or lost balance throughout the various past eras, followed by a possible near decade of research while he sought substantiation for his ideas. So far he'd had his name on two articles in juried publications, behind Nick's as a co-author; he had done very well for an undergraduate.

* * *

He threw himself into his classes, punctuated by Sunday dinner at Nick and Helen's, half an hour for a run each day, and one night a week out with the other postgraduate students for a beer, to share triumphs and miseries. It never hurt to know what was going on outside his department. Most of the time he only sat back and listened, bought a round when it was his turn, drank one beer and made sure anyone going home in his direction got there without trouble. He met with other students in his classes for study groups and projects, read journal articles, wrote projects and papers and delivered them to his professors. And he spent lunch every day and any spare minutes beyond that in Nick's office, making arrangements for digs, preparing specimens and checking the undergraduate cataloging in the collection, just to make sure nothing was mislabeled. It was a patchwork life, all the pieces of it fitting together in little ways, discussion to theory to research to writing to collaboration to refutation to more research and other considerations.

And he thrived on it that glorious year.

It didn't hurt that he'd decided to take that time away from any serious romantic situations. Honestly, he could barely fit eating into his schedule; some days he didn't get to run. How could he fit in a relationship as well? But he saw so many people, and he was so wrapped up in the work, he didn't have time to feel lonely. Once in a while, after the Thursday pub gathering, he and Taire, a postgraduate student in the Physics Department, would go home together and have breakfast together Friday morning before their respective study group meetings. It wasn't long-term, or anything more than a pastime, and both of them knew it, but they were colleagues, and friends, and it was fun, something to look forward to when work got horribly difficult, as it did about three times a week on average.

On the dig that term, Stephen realized the previous night's heated discussion of the Permian Era with Nick out on site had become a bit louder than usual when one of the first-years muttered, sotto voce over her breakfast coffee mug, "Couldn't you just shag like normal folks instead of arguing all night?"

"We're not shagging," he said calmly as her face flushed bright pink. "We're discussing the evidence for and against a variety of hypotheses."

"Right. It'd be quieter if you were shagging like bunnies." She gave him a tired glare. "Please, Stephen. Some of us can't sleep through everything."

"I'm sorry for your lost sleep; we didn't mean it to happen." He went into the tent and returned with one of his own sets of inexpensive foam marksman's earplugs and handed them to her, then pulled out a small spiral notebook and added earplugs to the list of supplies for his trip into the nearest town that afternoon for supplies. "There'll be more of these when I get back from town; I'll put them in the open area of the supply tent. You can let people know."

* * *

Nick and Helen went off to the US for two weeks for an international conference and a chance to work on a dig in Wyoming at the end of the second term. Stephen borrowed Nick's latest issues of Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Journal of Mammalogy (ASM), Nature, and British Journal of Experimental Biology, and took them with him to read in the evenings at his parents' place. He went walking with his father and the dogs, described the fashions he'd seen on campus for his mother, went riding with Dermot down to the lake, where they fished and talked about fossils, and went pub-crawling with Veronica, who introduced him to all her friends and refused to believe his life was as boring as he made it sound to them.

When they returned, Helen told him a tall tale about a coyote stealing Nick's jacket and Nick chasing it down, and Nick pretended to limp on the strained calf muscle he'd pulled in getting the jacket back. "It wasn't the jacket, you understand, but the good little hammer and tweezers I'd absent-mindedly put into the pocket." Nick's smile was self-effacing. "Keep your tools on you when you're working, Stephen. Invest in a pair of what the Americans call 'painter's pants', with pockets loose enough to hold all your tools. If you ever wear anything with so little style, that is."

"I'm not a fashion plate," Stephen retorted. "Mum doesn't design for men."

"Oh, I don't know about that. You always look in style to me." Helen's eyes had new sun crinkles at the corners.

"I don't even iron my blue jeans."

"Well, thank god for that. You've so many pairs of them, I'd never get any work out of you." Nick set down his cup of tea and stretched as he walked around the study. "So. Anything to note in the latest _Journal of Evolutionary Biology_?"

* * *

Toward the end of the year his after-dinner discussions with Nick and Helen had grown longer, more detailed, as he pulled together the varied pieces of the classes and reading and writing and realized they fit into more than one pattern, more than one kind of design. It was almost dizzying, the sense of thoughts falling into place one above another like the old transparencies his early schoolteachers had used before computer displays, one layer flipped over another, adding and subtracting colors and lines until the back-illuminated picture being projected was complete.

Nick was working on connecting some of the gaps in the mammalian fossil record, trying to locate the point at which reptiles and mammals met based on anatomy and how that fitted into what was scientifically acknowledged through the findings of molecular phylogenetic research. Stephen's share in this work was to examine how the sizes of the populations involved affected the adaptive rate and therefore their survival rate; Helen was adding in her expertise on evolutionary fitness and the limitations on migration that were the result of the glaciers. Stephen knew the three of them together could change the world. After a year of afternoon discussions turned to dinner talks to late-night wrangling, they wrote their first paper together, which was accepted by a major journal.

It was just as well that they got that far, he thought later, considering what happened next.

* * *

Before the end of the next year Helen's attention was straying elsewhere than their shared project, following an odd incident near the Forest of Dean.

The Botany Division had been delighted to find that some ancient plants, ferns whose long-preserved spores had somehow avoided fossilization, had managed to sprout and grow actual plants over in the Forest of Dean. The students involved in the project were over the moon about it; these specific ferns weren't part of the diet of any current animals, as they apparently tasted horrible, which meant they should have been able to continue to grow in their little test plot without much problem. So after the Thursday night when Alice from Botany showed up at the pub and said something had taken several large bites out of the biggest worst-tasting ferns, and the footprints and teeth marks were still there, Stephen happened to mention it to Helen, who passed her next-day's class off to the postgraduate student assisting her and drove over to check it out.

It was a good thing her classes were Friday and Wednesday; it gave her five days away, and she didn't return until Tuesday evening. Stephen found her in the hallway outside her office, on the phone. "You did? That's great. Karl, you're the best. Why don't you take care of Wednesday as well, and I'll sit in the back and observe. It's just moderating student presentations, and if you do it with me there it will count as observed teaching, which as you know gives one a bit of extra credit when it comes time for evaluations. Right. Yes. See you tomorrow."

Stephen couldn't help feeling impressed. She was covered in mud from head to toe, streaked with green from plants, with the evidence of scrapes on her arms and legs and across what he could see of her back.

"So what did you find?" he asked. He couldn't help being impressed by her aplomb.

Her smile was infectious. "I have photos, and casts of footprints, and there was a trail I followed into the forest for a couple of days. You wouldn't think the Forest of Dean was that big, but a large section of it hasn't had much human incursion for a thousand years or so, and the trail wandered all over the place."

"A trail?" He hadn't had a chance to track anything in months. "What kind of trail?"

"Aurochs."

"Extinct about four hundred years, I believe."

"More or less. So why did one of them wander through the Forest of Dean munching down on rare ferns?"

"Did you see it?"

She shook her head, frustrated. "I followed it for two days, I can't even tell you how many miles I went. The first night I slept in a tree, because I wasn't sure if it was alone. The second night I let it get further ahead of me, and I found a small hollow in a rocky hillside overlooking where it had been; I figured I could at least keep an eye on it." She had been gazing out the plate glass at the night sky as if she could still see what she described; now she turned and looked up into his eyes. "I woke as the sun was coming up; I've never seen a sunrise so blinding, so sparkling. So brilliant. The aurochs was in a small meadow halfway up the mountain; I could see it so clearly: _Bos primigenius_ in the flesh. It walked toward the sunshine and it … disappeared." Her shoulders drooped. "I climbed down and went to where it had been, and lost the trail on rock. And then I walked back."

"When's the last time you ate a solid meal, Helen?"

She paused. "If today is Tuesday, then it was at least a day ago."

"Come back to my place; you can take a shower and I'll cook you dinner. I'd take you to the pub, but I think you'd rather be better dressed there."

"I need to tell Nick about this."

"You can call him from my place."

Helen had phoned Nick on Stephen's phone, set so they could both talk. Nick sounded unexpectedly philosophical about what Helen had found. "Aurochs, you say? Hmm. What were the dimensions of the footprints? That sounds about right.

"So you think I've found something extraordinary?" She was toweling her hair dry, and sat wrapped in the plushy bathrobe Stephen's mother had given him for Christmas two years ago that he never wore, preferring sweats.

"Possibly. You know, it could be one of those rare cattle breeds, escaped from a farm when some tourist opened a gate. There are a few of those farms in the region."

"Wasn't there someone a few years ago trying to breed back modern cattle to the aurochs?" Stephen called from the kitchen, where he was throwing together a cheese omelette and sausages. "Heck cattle?"

"Completely different head. This looked more like the Irish white cattle with the curving horns. Not white, though." Helen frowned. "Heck cattle have scrunched faces."

"Scrunched. Well, they do have shorter faces than what we know of classical aurochs heads." Nick's chuckle was audible. "You might want to check on whether any local farmers might have imported a Heck bull that got loose."

"And walked into aaaaaaCHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOO!" Helen wiped her nose with a paper napkin. "Sorry. I'll get back after dinner."

"No problem. See you when you arrive." Nick clicked off.

Stephen flipped the omelet onto the plate with the sausages and put it in front of her "He's pretty casual about you being away for so long."

Helen dug into the food eagerly. "Oh, this is good. Thank you." She gulped coffee and he refilled her cup from the pot. "Casual? You didn't realize Nick and I have an open marriage?"

Stephen blinked. "You do? That's not something I'd expect of him."

"Nick can be surprising." She concentrated on eating as he sat, stunned. "You didn't know that he has something going with Wylie Bannister over in Performing Arts?"

"I knew he'd been helping her out with some things," Stephen admitted. He'd walked in on Nick talking to her on the phone, something about loaning out departmental books so she could research dinosaurs for the set design of a production of _Midsummer Night's Dream_.

Helen seemed calm about it, much more than he'd expected. "I've shocked you. Should I say that I'm sorry? Poor Stephen, I'm enlarging your worldview when you didn't expect it."

He shrugged, consciously borrowing the gesture from his man-of-the-world brother. "What about you?"

"I haven't, yet. But I could." She finished the last sausage. "We don't discuss it. That's the agreement: we don't ever discuss it, and we stay together. I do love him, you know. But if I should ever take a notion…" She sipped her third cup of coffee, eyeing him over the rim of the cup she held in both hands. "It wouldn't be out of the question."

"Uh-huh."

He drove her back to the university car park, where she picked up her old car and headed off up the hill, after kissing him on the cheek to thank him for dinner and shower. Back at his apartment, he picked up the plushy bathrobe to hang it in the closet. It was as if the scent of her skin was everywhere around him, going through him like lightning.

* * *

Another article sent to juried publications, on the incremental gains they'd made in their study. Stephen had done most of the writing, with Nick and Helen adding a paragraph or two and some editing. Nick took him out for dinner when the article was accepted.

"If you do this every time I publish anything, I'm going to get as fat as the Chancellor," Stephen said over the lobster-and-shrimp bake. "Not that I'm complaining about the food."

"You'll just have to run a few more miles," Nick said. "And cut back on the drawn butter."

"It's too bad Helen couldn't make it."

Nick shrugged one shoulder, bemused. "She's off in the Forest of Dean again on her wild aurochs chase."

Stephen sat back in his chair. The waiter took the opportunity to refill his water glass, and he nodded thanks. "I looked up everything written about Heck cattle when she first went out there. They may look like an aurochs, but they're smaller, not much larger than larger ordinary breeds. They're only half a ton in weight. Aurochs could be near two meters at the shoulder and were described as being almost as large as an elephant. It's the same description right down the ages, from Rome onward."

"Well, that's Helen for you. Gets an idea in her head and has to work it out for herself in order to accept that it doesn't fly. Mind you, it's not news. I knew that when I married her." Nick speared a bit of asparagus with his fork. "She wouldn't be such a fine scientist if she didn't have a few flaming passions about her work."

For a moment Stephen toyed with asking whether any of those flaming passions came from having an open marriage, but he applied his attention to the shrimp instead. It wasn't his business at all. "Did you look at the casts she made of tracks?"

Nick sighed. "They're fairly useless. The mud she cast them in was so wet that it's hard to tell if she was chasing cattle or bears. Not that we have bears in the Forest of Dean, or even in Britain any more." Nick seemed calm enough about it all.

"Don't you worry about her?"

"Of course I worry, but it's not going to do any good, is it? She's the most self-reliant woman I ever met." Nick gestured with his fork. "She can shoot, too. I'd depend on her to defend me if there were danger. If you weren't around, that is."

"Not likely we're going to run into danger with what we're doing." Stephen calculated the probability of their research finding a dangerous creature that he'd have to defend Nick from as somewhere around 0.00000001 percent. "Though I could give you shooting lessons. I've got the certification."

"No, thanks. I did a little hunting in my youth; it was enough for me." But Nick's eyes were straying across the room, as if he half expected Helen to walk in when they both knew she was an hour away by car.

"So, what do you think of the recent attempt to reclassify _Protoceratops andrewsi_?" he asked instead.

* * *

Perhaps he'd had his head in his work too long. He'd been staying late at Nick's office every Friday, when he was often the only one in the building, just to get quiet thinking time. Lately he'd been so busy that he had had trouble finding time to run; he'd been getting up early to get in his four miles a day, and it wasn't doing enough to clear the cobwebs out of his mind. So he took advantage of everyone else's night off to use Nick's personal library and the department lab for research.

He had the large table in the lab cleared, all the models except the ones he needed stacked back on the shelves. Around him he had open a dozen reference books, journals and papers, and in their midst he sat with his laptop computer and made calculations and copied notes and pulled together inferences from the differences in size and features of various finds around the globe. This would be the basis of his doctoral dissertation, and he had to have an outline done inside a month and submitted to Nick and Phillips, his other advisor, for comment.

He hadn't seen Helen for more than a few minutes at a time in nearly a month, though he'd been over at the house several times to drop off or pick up books Nick wanted. Nick was great about people but not so wonderful with bringing along the books and tools he needed when his mind was elsewhere, and recently it had been elsewhere more than usual. This meant that Stephen often had to dash over at the last minute to pick up things like the last two years of The Journal of Paleontology, or some book from Nick's personal collection that he'd pulled off the shelf and left on the piano, as usual.

When the voices from the hallway intruded on his consciousness, he was so startled that he caught himself glancing around for a suitably sized bone to use as a club, in case of trouble. Sometimes the football fans cut through the building after a game, as it was between the playing field, the sports pubs and student housing -- but he didn't know of any games tonight. He sat in the office and listened to the voices distorted by echoes in the long glass corridor.

"It's verifiable. I've found –"

"Nonsense. You may be certifiable, but it's not verifiable. There's no proof out there. It's a wild goose chase."

"You come with me. I'll show you what I found in the Forest of Dean."

"I haven't time, Helen. Can't it wait until term break? Or at least next weekend?"

"It probably won't be there next weekend. These things don't seem to stick around that long."

"Well, then, what's the point?" Nick's voice rose in argument. "How do you know it's not some local having you on with a practical joke?"

"The point is that evolution doesn't stop just because you don't have time to watch it, Nick!" And Helen burst into the room, turning to face Nick, who was hunching his shoulder just a bit as if he were a bull about to charge.

Before they reached the door, Stephen had decided that he wasn't going to say anything unless specifically called upon.

"I know well enough that evolution doesn't stop; if it did I wouldn't be teaching about it. And you know well enough that I don't have time this weekend. You know my schedule; I've been asked to go up to London to speak to someone at the Home Office about suburban sprawl and the threat to on-site research. And, before you ask, I'm not going to ask Stephen to take on anything else right now; he's doing enough."

"It's not even two hours away. Take off one afternoon, Nick, please, for me."

Nick put up his hands as if in defense. "I've told you. This weekend I can't get away. Not for the afternoon, not at all." And he turned and saw Stephen sitting at the long table surrounded by his research. "Don't feel you have to put your work aside for this, Stephen. It's a load of bullshit."

"Thank you ever so much for your unbiased opinion, Professor Cutter, considering that you haven't even seen the evidence yet." The edge in Helen's voice was barely hidden.

Stephen put down his pen. "An afternoon?"

"One afternoon, that's all I'm asking. Are you busy tomorrow?"

Stephen glanced at Nick, whose mouth had set into an obstinate line. "Sorry, tomorrow's locked in right now. But I could take some time Sunday afternoon."

"Right, then. One p.m., our place, I'll drive, and I'll have you back by evening."

"I can do that." But, watching Nick's stubborn jaw, he still felt cautious.

* * *

The cloudy sky threatened rain as they drove in Stephen's little car. He'd gotten into the habit of keeping his camping gear in the boot, so he had only to throw in the tent and the spare tarp next to Helen's backpack with its own small tent attached.

Helen was quiet but her eyes glowed. She had insisted on bringing quick-setting plaster and a large plastic bowl for making casts of footprints, as well as her good SLR camera. "I don't care if it's old," she told him. "It's sturdy. It's seen me through a lot of expeditions and it'll see me through more of them."

"I'm hearing good things of some of the new digital cameras," Stephen offered, to keep some conversation going that didn't have as much to do with where they were going.

Helen waved away the concept of technological progress. "They're all run by batteries, right? The only thing on this that needs a battery is the light meter, and I can manage without one most of the time by choosing my film." She told him about how she shot with ASA 100 film for detail and ASA 400 for a trade-off between accuracy and speed, both of them black-and-white, and then ASA 1000 for multiple lighting conditions, how she did her developing and printing. She had brought along a dozen rolls of film in little canisters on the camera strap, six on each side. It reminded Stephen of a bizarre utilitarian version of a big silver-and-turquoise necklace he'd seen in a museum. He kept his mind busy with trying to recall where and when he'd seen the necklace, nodding occasionally as he drove toward the Forest.

William the Conqueror had set the Forest aside as a royal hunting preserve a thousand years before; since then the royal prerogative had kept out development and depredation. The land was not entirely untouched – old rights-of-way ran through it that had been there before William left France – but it had purposely and carefully been kept an ancient forest as much as possible by its foresters and verderers. A narrow green belt of pasture separated the woodland from the farms and from the villages that had grown up over the centuries, so that as they drove toward it the hills rose, irregular and shadowed in dark green, from a sunlit strip of emerald.

He'd been there before on walking trips, but had not walked there extensively. Helen directed him to park near a chain-link fence, in an area near a historic walking path, where the newer trees were anywhere from fifty to a hundred years old, but the older ones were four-century-old thick-trunked oaks. So many oaks had heavy limbs growing parallel to the ground that he could easily imagine someone using them as a movie set for a version of Robin Hood. The forest was quiet, but it was the quiet of large trees moving the tips of their branches in breezes far over their heads, in a time before leaves were fully out on them. A few birds could be heard. Though the air felt cool and damp, it was no worse than walking in the Highlands and the altitude was lower. There was no wind at ground level to speak of, and the light would hold for two or three hours.

"Now, I want to be clear on this," he said as he buckled on his backpack. "This is one night away at most and then we go back, right? You have classes and I have work."

"If we find what I found before, it'll be one afternoon away, and then going back with the evidence," Helen assured him. "I'm not as fond of the wet as you and Nick."

"It's just weather." He waited. "Where do you want to start?"

The experimental garden, which had died back in the winter, was starting to put forth new fiddleheads of ferns, but by the evidence something had eaten almost all the new growth. Helen took photos of them from several angles, but stopped Stephen when he started to move forward. "You're the tracker. What do you see?"

He looked at the ground near the fern garden, blinked and leaned closer. "That's …"

"You see why I wanted to bring the plaster."

" – not a bovine hoofprint." He pointed. "It's split, but the wrong shape, and if it's stepping that deeply into the mud there should be some evidence of the hock at the back. There, look at that one." He pointed at a different hoofprint. "Do you see it?"

"Then what is it?"

"I don't know. Are there any private zoos around here?"

"There's the Wellington, but it's pretty conventional. Nothing there that I wouldn't recognize. What do you think it might be?"

He straightened again, his eyes still on the ground, following the trail the animal had left. "It's a bit ragged at the edges, but it's bigger than I expected. You know, there's still a small population of wild boar in the area, but even they aren't this big."

Helen bit her lip. "Well, I'll get the plaster anyway. Botany will want to know what's eating their prize ferns."

"Could be someone's sow got loose from a local farm. Botany should move their garden back to the University greenhouse." He felt bad for Helen's sake, making the suggestion, but the evidence didn't say aurochs to him, if for no other reason than that the footprint wasn't big enough. A one-tonne aurochs should have a foot the size of a dinner plate. "At least it's not deer."

"Thank heaven for small favors. I'd hate to think I got you to come all the way out here for Bambi and Thumper."

"Wasn't Thumper a rabbit?"

She mixed and poured the fast-setting plaster into the best-preserved of the hoofprints, crouching next to where she worked and setting the plastic mixing bowl on the top of one of the rocks that marked the corners of the plot of ferns. The air was cool; the plaster steamed visibly in the pot, cooling as it set after being poured. As she worked he followed the tracks with his eyes, then walked a little way down the trail they made between the trees.

He stopped and stood still, listening. The birds were still singing. The tracks back by the fern bed hadn't been bovine – he'd still bet on them being made by wild boar or someone's prize hog that got loose – but the ones he stood over now were. There was a beauty just ahead of his left foot, showing the bifurcated hoof splayed out to support great weight, and a spread the size of his mother's Royal Doulton plates. This was out of the shadow of the larger trees, and the smaller ones grew closer together. He measured with his eyes, looking for evidence of the horns – there, just above his eye level, scraped places on adjacent trees nearly five feet apart that could have been made by something hard and sharp-pointed.

"What is it?" Helen said, her voice low.

"I don't know," he said, "but I think you weren't completely wrong. Something very large has been here. It's not the same thing that was eating the ferns, though."

"You see what I mean about things not making sense."

"Yes." He wanted, badly, to be back in Nick's office with access to all the reference material in the known world, both on the shelves and on online. "Get out the plaster; I'll see where it went."

Stephen followed the trail around the mountainside until it simply disappeared between the roots of one tree and another, on plain open ground where even a squirrel's passage would have left marks.

* * *

They brought back the casts in late evening, too eager to wait overnight, and put them in the center of the large lab table; the rest of the table was filled with stacks of references through which they thumbed, pacing around the table, arguing, making coffee and arguing more. Somewhere in the midst of this, Nick arrived, walking into the midst of the discussion.

"Did you know you two can be heard almost from the parking lot?" he asked. "What's all this, now?"

"Evidence." Helen showed him the first cast, and the notes she'd made documenting the locations, measurements, number of hoofprints. "And there's more."

Nick turned to Stephen. "Well?"

Stephen described how he'd found the larger footprints, and trailed it to a place where the creature must have vanished, somehow. "I've never seen anything like it, and I've been stalking game nearly twenty years."

"There aren't a lot of possibilities here," Nick said. "This –" he pointed to the first cast, with its narrow-set, oversized bifurcated hoofprints, "— is probably wild boar, though it's unusually large. I'm not surprised that it went for the ferns; swine will eat anything. But this other one, oh, that's the puzzler."

"What do you think it is?" Stephen asked. "It's not a hoofprint I'm familiar with. Too large, for one thing."

"I'm not sure it's a hoofprint at all, unless some lad's been dressing up his prize Shire or Clydesdale stud in the horse equivalent of pattens."

"Pattens?" Helen looked up from the table. "Now, there's an image."

"What are they?" Stephen asked.

"A sort of wooden clog with supports underneath it that ladies used a few hundred years ago, so they could walk through the muddy streets and keep their dresses clean," Helen said. She gestured toward the largest cast. "I do see your point; it looks like someone pressing two separated, barely curved semicircles down – but there was a trail of these tracks, Nick. I seriously doubt that anyone's making Piltdown Pattens to confuse us. What would be the point?"

"You know as well as I that students will do anything." Nick shook his head. "I want to say this is the hoofprint of … something. But I can't tell you what. There are just too many problems with the shape."

The long day had worn on Stephen's tact. "Problems or not, it doesn't change the fact that some creature with four of those feet, or hooves, wandered through the Forest of Dean and left a trail that disappeared in a clearing where it should have left perfect prints. Something is going on there."

"What?" Nick threw back at him.

"I don't know. But I didn't imagine it." His voice echoed from the glass hallway.

Helen blinked. "We've got evidence this time. I don't know what it's proof of, but it's evidence of animals nobody expected that are in the Forest of Dean. I think it's worth further investigation."

* * *

By the end of the term, Helen was spending more time in the Forest of Dean than at the university, according to Stephen's calendar. Even though he was technically Nick's assistant, he'd been called in to teach for her when her student assistant, Karl, caught whatever virus was going around.

Nick was not happy with this development, and said so. Helen said he was being a stick in the mud. Nick said she was ignoring her work, not to mention ignoring their marriage, and was he going to have to be extinct before she noticed him?

Stephen didn't want to know what was said when he wasn't overhearing it.

The one bright spot came from an eager student who showed up with a blurry tabloid photo of something large with teeth, taken near the Forest of Dean. The student, Connor Temple, was taking Nick's introductory undergraduate class but appeared knowledgeable enough about past eras and the various forms of ancient life in them that he could have taught about half of that class. After talking with Connor, Stephen went out on his own, armed, and found large tracks, torn-up fencing, and dead deer tossed in a heap as if for the fun of it. As he had half-expected, the tracks ended in an empty hollow; the animal had been running full out and then… just wasn't there.

Connor was enthusiastic and detail-oriented but, best of all, he was such a fan of ancient life that he'd been building his own database about dinosaurs, prehistoric insects, birds, mammals, and everything else since he was twelve years old. He had every creature cross-referenced by geological era, description of known fossils, estimated size including variations by geographical location, genus and species. He had information on what was known of what every creature might have eaten, what its temperament might have been like, and whether it might have been solitary or social. He was a walking user-friendly encyclopedia of anything anyone might want to know about extinct creatures from the time they started sprouting fins in the oceans or crawled up onto the land.

In an ideal world, Stephen thought, Connor would have been older, so he could have been one of Helen's students, and would have spent more time outdoors. As it was, Connor helped Stephen and Nick, but Stephen was the one whom Helen called when she wanted assistance. It wasn't that Nick wouldn't have helped – he did, whenever she asked, though his help came with sarcasm – but he couldn't always get away. And, much as he tried to be there for her, he admitted privately to Stephen, Stephen could generally be much more helpful to her.

"I know there's talk around campus about you two," Nick said to him, one quiet afternoon when they were alone in the office, "but that's par for the course these days. Believe me, Stephen, I'm very grateful that you're willing to assist her. With the best will in the world, I'm just not that much of a woodsman." Nick looked away, out the window, and Stephen stared at his mug or at the bookshelf, or anywhere but Nick's face. "Just -- you make sure she comes back; I don't care about anything else."

Nick harrumphed to himself, rubbed his hand over his face and walked out of the room. Stephen let him have a long time alone before he went back in and quietly sat down at his desk.

So it was Stephen who picked up the phone a week later in Nick's office and heard Helen say, "I need you here. Please, Stephen. There's something big in the forest, and it's following me."

"Can't you leave?" he asked, meanwhile waving his hand for Nick's attention.

"It's between me and the car. I'm up a tree, about halfway around the first hill, near the river. About a quarter mile before the valley." Her voice sounded abnormally tense. "I don't think it's the only thing out here. I've been hearing something larger and faster, and I don't want to wait alone to find out what it is."

"I'm coming," Stephen said. He stood, closing his laptop. Nick looked across at him. "She's calling for help."

"Go. What do you need?" Nick tossed him the keys to the department Range Rover, which would get him there faster and go cross country, if necessary, much more easily than his own small Morris. "If you need me, call and I'll come with Connor, though what we'd do in an emergency I've no idea."

"If I can't handle it, call out the Army." Stephen caught the keys out of the air, slung his leather jacket over his shoulder, and was out the door and outside the building before he could think. He paused only to move his own camping gear and weapons from the boot of his car to the Range Rover before he spun the vehicle out of the carpark and onto the road.

Once there, he loaded his target rifle and a pistol, put the pistol in its holster on his belt and slung the rifle over his shoulder where he could easily pull it into position. Openly carrying them was strictly against the law, not that anyone was going to see him in the Forest except Helen. He didn't care. If people wanted to come after him for a firearms violation, they could queue up after he got back. He strapped on his lightweight survival pack, and headed into the forest following the trail she'd left. She was certainly right that something large had been through the area; many of the smaller trees and bushes had broken branches or tips, and some of the fallen brush had been crushed underfoot or shoved aside. Stephen estimated that whatever had done the crushing had to be sufficiently larger than a draft horse, and moving quickly. He pulled the rifle under his arm and continued walking with it in an easy position to raise and fire with little notice.

Her trail led up the mountain to a tree where a shred of cloth testified to her having been there, but then went downhill again toward the river. He listened; yes, birds were still singing, so nothing of a size or ferocity to frighten them was in the forest now. He sped up from walking toward running as he moved downhill; what had begun as a deer track had widened, and was moving directly toward the water, but there were still occasional shreds of cloth on the ground and on the trees.

When he reached the riverbank he slowed, hearing fewer birds. Something large was moving off to the left, a dark presence between and beyond the dark trunks of the trees. He held his breath, waiting for it to move into the brightness at the river where he could see what it was, and when it did move into view he let his breath become silent and deep, a wordless prayer for Helen's safety.

It was the largest bull Stephen had ever seen, dark-coated, shaggy-headed, with enormously long curving horns. The crest of its shoulders had to be as high as he was tall; he had stood under that oak tree in the past and had reached one hand up to brush his fingertips against the underside of the long branch extending toward the water, the branch that the sharp tips of its horns were barely missing.

Stephen's heart pounded in his chest and he stood motionless, as close to the nearest tree as he could manage. He thought of the fresco from Crete, the young boys dancing with the enormous bull the size of an elephant, and the paintings in the Lascaux caves of black or red bulls with enormous curving horns and shaggy locks on their foreheads. He thought of the bulls raising their heads in challenge on the Ishtar Gate, guarding ancient Babylon along with Atlas lions and the sirush that nobody could explain.

The bull was young, curious, exploring its territory. It sniffed at the water before drinking and snorted afterward, raising its head and looking around, once looking directly at him as he stood motionless, and downwind, before taking another drink and then melting back into the forest, walking steadily away from him between the shadowed trees, toward the side of the next mountain.

Helen had been right. That bull was enough like an aurochs that it could have posed for one of the medieval portraits. The only other creature that had ever been mistaken for the aurochs was the European bison, and both he and Helen knew the differences; it had been part of that first class she'd taught him. How the bull had gotten there was the question, and where it lived, as well as whether it was the only one. Stephen felt an unholy laugh attempting to rise up from deep within himself at the thought that the quickly multiplying herds of deer might not be the only creatures to blame for the recent complaints about someone chomping on the local neighbors' kitchen gardens.

But where was Helen?

The forest was quiet, the simple rustling quiet of a place where birds and squirrels move freely. He took the chance on calling her name, and saw her unfold herself from her perch on a high branch of a beech tree, her back toward the trunk, some thirty feet above the ground.

"Are you all right?"

She shook her head. "Get up here!" A synthetic rope dropped from the tree next to him. "Listen. Get up here now."

And then it was all he could hear, the heavy bodies thundering toward them from the hillside, the snorts and grunts and occasional squeals pitched like screams. On sheer adrenalin he slung his gun on its strap over the back of his shoulder and scaled the tree. She moved over slightly and he came up behind her, half-falling into a natural hollow in the tree that would be just large enough to contain both of them and their packs if they were curled together. He dropped his pack off his shoulders into the hollow as she hauled the rope up – it had been tied around the limb just above them – and grabbed his arm.

"Look," she whispered. "Entelodonts."

He looked, and as one they pushed back into the hollow, as far out of sight as they could manage.

There were half a dozen of them, _Paraentelodon intermedium_. Stephen had seen the casts of their meter-long fossilized skulls and estimated the strength of the broken tusks that had been found with them. Looking at their mineralized bones was nothing like seeing the live animals with tusks polished to sharp-tipped ivory, watching them drinking from the river, wading in and catching fish in their mouths or stripping leaves from convenient branches two meters from the ground. Some were the size of the aurochs; some were taller in the shoulders but leaner, with long sloping backs and short sturdy legs built for endurance and strength. Their hairy coats grew in several shades of mottled brown, similar to military camouflage colors, the thick bristles along their spines could have provided scrub brushes for an army, and the jowls that extended on either side of their jaws made them look like demented nightmare warthogs. No wonder they were nicknamed 'devil pigs' – they made native wild boar look peaceable as doves in comparison.

"Omnivores," he whispered back to her. "I'm glad you had the rope."

"Never travel without it."

He thought for a moment that one or more of the entelodonts had heard them, through the breeze rasping the mostly bare branches together, but when the whole group raised their heads and stared across the river he realized it was something else.

Helen had her camera out, its base set into an extendable monopod, and was adjusting the settings. "Not enough light, damn it. I'll have to try a longer exposure and hope they hold still." She rested the foot of the monopod on the branch and shot several frames, trying not to establish the kind of regular rhythm that would indicate a mechanical – strange – sound that might alarm them.

Stephen had his rifle at the ready, loaded, aiming downward. "There's no evidence they ever tried to knock over trees, is there?"

"Not anything of this size." She shook her head, still intent on the photos, but aimed further away, at the ones that were standing in the river, perhaps in the hope that the reflected light on the water would make the animals show up better. They were all standing very still, only their nostrils flaring as they raised their heads to catch the breeze from the other side of the water.

The entelodonts' own rank scent rose up from the riverbank, unlike anything Stephen had ever encountered, and he wondered if it would put off local animals from coming down for water.

Apparently not. Something else was moving over there, upwind, across the water. Two pairs of roe deer peered hesitantly out from the light underbrush. They were does, probably last year's fawns. Here, in the forest that had been reserved for hunting by kings alone for a thousand years, they had few if any natural predators. An occasional dog from a rural farm might chase them for a mile or two, but there were no wolves in Britain now, and no bears. The diminishing light in the west was signaling them to come down to the river for water as they wandered and fed, just as it always did.

The deer didn't have a chance. As one monstrous being the entelodonts charged, and one doe fell before she could turn to jump away. Another managed a single leap, straight up, attempting to swivel in midair, before she was brought down. The other two didn't even get that far.

Helen adjusted the lens on the camera and snapped photos as long as her film lasted, changed to another roll and filled that one, then stopped and leaned back into the curve of his body, her hands shaking. Stephen put his hands over hers, picked up the camera, put it behind them inside the tree, and drew her further back in as well. Darkness was falling, and the sounds of slaughter and noisy feeding continued. The smell of blood mixed with the harsh scent of the entelodonts made him want to retch. He watched them tear apart their food, feeling the cold certainty at the base of his spine that, had it not been for Helen's rope, he'd have met the same fate.

Helen was still shaking, not only her hands but her whole body. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled her back against himself, curled himself around her. Night was falling quickly in the shadow of the mountain, and the nightmare sounds outside went on and on. Along with the darkness came the evening damp, and he could feel it despite his jacket and the sweater under it. He kept one arm around her, and with the other hand he fished in his pack for the emergency blanket he kept there, metallic on one side and dark green on the other. He tucked it around the both of them, metallic side in to reflect back their body heat. Gradually, by the time it was fully dark, her muscles had stilled their involuntary quivering but by her breathing he knew she was still awake.

Outside it had become quieter, the normal sounds of owls and night creatures starting around them and above them.

"We – they --"

"We're not going anywhere tonight," Stephen said. "Not when they can see in the dark and we don't have night glasses, or a howitzer."

He flipped open his mobile, but it refused to connect; no surprise with the spotty coverage from the companies as well as hills blocking the signal in every direction. At least they had food, and illumination, and the other things in his pack.

"Have you eaten?" he asked her.

"Not for a while."

He couldn't reach things easily from where they were; they shifted around so that she was still curled up between his legs, with the emergency blanket around them both, but sideways to the opening. The hollow in which they huddled was shaped like an irregular oval. Underneath them the wood was half rough, half polished, as if someone or something else had once lived there. It was rougher overhead and at the sides, and as they moved the scent of the wood began to distract him from the horrors outside. Now he could stretch out his legs a little further and maybe keep them from cramping. He handed her the water bottle first, and she drank slowly, while he dug through the pack for the bullet-shaped metal thermos he'd filled with tea that morning in what now seemed like a different life.

"Hot tea with sugar." She opened the thermos and drank from the cup first, while he had some water. "Maybe not so not now."

"It's wonderful."

His fingers touched plastic packaging. "I've got some food here, but not much."

"I ate mine already," she admitted. "I was on my way back when I ran into them, and ended up here."

"How did you get your mobile to work?"

"I went up higher, till the branches were too light. And then it ran out of battery."

"Good thing you called the office first." He didn't want to think of her out here alone all night without food, balancing on a limb above the vicious tusks and sharp hooves.

She refilled the cup and handed it to him and he sipped it slowly, letting the hot tea warm him.

"I don't often need rescuing. I've tried all my life be self-sufficient. This world's not kind to people who aren't." Her voice was quiet. "But I'm so glad you were there the one percent of time when I did need it."

"Always," he told her. "Always."

* * *

Stephen opened his eyes in the darkness, chilled, and reached up to pull his coat tighter around his throat. He should have consulted the weather forecast in the newspaper before he left, or on the radio in the car as he drove, but he'd been too worried by the tone of her voice. Now they were about a third of the way up a tree, the one place where he couldn't light a fire for heat.

He didn't realize he'd awakened Helen as well until he heard her dry chuckle.

"Poor Stephen. Here, let me get a little closer. All the clichés about shared body heat are clichés because they're true, you know."

"I know," he said, shoving his pack behind his head to keep it off the damp wood. "There was this camping trip when I was a boy …"

Her hands were warm, under his sweater and against his skin, and he pulled her closer. Amazing impossible survivalist woman, getting him stuck up a tree, up _in_ a tree, during what was apparently turning into the coldest night of the season. If he could have seen anything, he would probably have seen his breath first of all.

Her hands slipped lower.

"Helen –"

"Open marriage, remember?"

He shook his head – it still seemed so unlike Nick, despite what he'd said -- but his lips parted at her next kiss and he tasted the remnant of the sweet tea in her mouth.

Still, he resisted for a moment. "I don't have anything here – "

She rested her forehead against his, and he could feel her breath against his lips. "It's all right, I'm covered."

Helen had a small tarp in her pack; it went underneath them. Better to keep bits of wood out of tender areas from the start, the back of Stephen's mind reminded him as his own jeans came down, than to have to explain and find tweezers later. He felt unexpectedly grateful that, with the chill and the damp outdoors, the ants they otherwise would have had to deal with had withdrawn to less-exposed positions. They kept their sweaters on, but she struggled out of her trousers and boots – at least, he could not feel them against his bared legs. He tucked the corner of their featherweight blanket under one of the backpacks to keep it from blowing or falling outside, and pulled the rest over them both.

The wind blew around them, tugging at the light blanket, and Helen moved away from him just long enough to pull it back over herself and snag it on a piece of wood, cursing the cold under her breath as she did. When she returned, sliding her hand up under his sweater, he pushed her own sweater up and ducked his head underneath. Her skin tasted like amber, like the scent that arose from his father's half-kilo lump of New Zealand kauri gum that sat in the kitchen window where it could grow warm in the afternoon sun. She straddled him and pulled him back up so she could kiss him breathless, until he put a hand behind her head and showed her what he could do with hands and lips and tongue.

She was as lean and muscular as he was, and nearly as strong for her size. Somewhere in the night she held his wrists over his head as she covered him, rode him, made him writhe. As he felt her clutching him she loosened her grip on his wrist and fell forward, her hand against his chest for balance, and he caught her to him, writing her name with the tip of his tongue on the tender skin below her ear, her hair falling all around his face. She caught her breath and her balance, and gripped him more tightly and he surged into her, his feet braced against the rough walls. Later, she curled up on her side in front of him and he held her breasts, so soft in the darkness, as though she might fly away if he did not hold her, as if his small movements inside her were not enough to keep her in his arms. He braced his other hand against the backpack, where it slid until he was grasping the stock of his rifle as it was jammed into a gap in the wood. His feet in their boots pressed against the wood, and she must have been putting her hands against the wooden walls too because when she brought one of them back to hold onto his hips, behind hers, she had to brush soft dry wood chips off it first. The wind had picked up outside, and the trunk swayed a little, but Stephen barely noticed their great wooden cradle rocking as they rocked each other, heated and slippery, until they were done, curled together in the warmth, finally falling asleep.

When they awoke, skin half-stuck to the metallic blanket in a few places, the sun was rising over the mountains to the east – but there was a glow in the west, just over the crest of the mountain's ridge, where the open meadow had been. Helen leaned out of the tree as far as she could, wearing Stephen's hastily thrown-on jacket, and with him anchoring her to keep her from falling, and sighted through the long lens until she caught the amazing sight: the entelodonts, like commuters heading for the subway, jostled one another as they hurried through something round that glowed and sparkled and then appeared to close in upon itself and disappear. And then, further over to the side, where they would have been unable to see it from anywhere else, another sparkling bright glow, and the great dark aurochs bull walking out of the trees into the clearing, calmly and steadily, black against the light, hesitating for a moment and then walked into that glow. This glow stayed there just enough longer for Helen to take one more shot before it was gone, between one breath and the next, leaving behind a small empty meadow marked by a lightning-split tree.

They dressed quickly, because of the early morning mist shedding beads of water on everything. Helen paused before picking up her boots to take his face between her hands for a long, slow kiss, then reached back to pick up a sock and pull splinters out of it with her fingertips. After they climbed down, while his backpack and rifle were still leaning against the tree, he turned her toward himself, and watched her eyes go wide in surprise before he wrapped her in his arms for one more kiss, just one, fierce and sweet, trailing off into gentleness as he brushed her neck with his lips and waited for a few seconds as his heartbeat slowed to normal. She touched his face with her hand and smiled, then turned away to finish her roll of film by shooting the cracked bones and scraps of bloody brown-furred skin on the other riverbank, to unload and reload the camera, and to make a cast of the sharp-edged hoofprints of the entelodonts, one on top of another on the riverbank above the water.

They hiked to the ridge over which they'd been looking, a little more than a hundred meters away, and down into the meadow beyond, where Stephen made quick-setting casts of the hoofprints of six entelodonts and a young bull aurochs with the supplies in Helen's pack and Helen took more photos, of the ground before the plaster was added, of the plaster in place, of the trees and setting in general. She finished the roll of film in her camera by taking a photo of Stephen standing where the aurochs had stood still, just before it disappeared, in front of the tree whose outflung branch had been struck by lightning and thus could be distinguished from any other, in case anyone might think that they'd just seen someone's vagrant Aberdeen Angus gone missing from its barnyard. They climbed the lightning-struck tree to wait until the plaster had set, shared the last of their food, and said not a word the whole time.

* * *

Helen developed and printed the photos in her darkroom at the house, and brought them with her to the university the next day. Once classes were over, she laid them out on the table in Nick's office as he watched. Stephen shut the door behind her and leaned against it, to give the impression to anyone who might want to interrupt that this was one of those private conferences that students might not want to stumble into.

"I don't believe it." Nick stared at the photos lined up on the table, and at the plaster casts. "The footprints could be faked, you know they could, but the photos – oh, god, the photos…"

"I think we should talk with the local farmers. Check the incident reports with the local police," Stephen said. "Find out if they're hearing strange noises, seeing odd tracks, missing a sheep or two."

"The government's going to want to be in on this, you know they are," Helen said. She was pacing the opposite direction to Nick. Between the two of them, they were starting to make Stephen feel dizzy.

"Entelodonts! And these shots of the deer, and what happened to them. It's like something out of _National Geographic_." Nick shook his head, never taking his eyes from the photos. "It's a terribly good thing you two know how to climb trees."

"Basic survival training," Stephen said. He felt a treacherous glow moving within himself as he watched Helen move in her slim black trousers, the ones she preferred to wear on days when she taught. He had to remind himself of who they were, who he was, who Nick was. But he could not find regret within himself for any of it.

"Did you see anything else?" Nick asked.

Helen shook her head. "Wasn't that enough for now?"

"Of course it was. But –"

"I've been thinking about those ferns. It's pretty unlikely for fern spores to just grow like that, especially ones that spent so long between layers of rock." Stephen leaned his head back against the doorframe, watching Nick look at what they'd found. "We saw two glowing areas that animals were moving through; do you think it's possible that plants could move through as well? Seeds? Spores?"

"Hitchhiking on the creatures? It's more than possible. That's one of the major ways plants have always moved from place to place. Think of those cockleburs you get in your socks." Helen tapped her forefinger against her lips. "Maybe the smell of the ferns, and any other out-of-place plants that just happen to grow in the area, attracts the animals to come through."

"The Home Office will want to know about this, not that they're equipped to do anything about it," Nick said.

"Do we have to do that yet?" Helen leaned forward over the table, watching Nick. Stephen noticed that she wasn't wearing her wedding ring, and had a crazy moment of trying to remember if she'd worn it in the woods and might have left it up in the tree. "Can't it be declared a site of special scientific interest, and left alone for us to investigate for a while?"

"If what had come through the – I'm going to call them anomalies, for lack of a better word – the anomalies had been harmless, I'd have no problem with keeping it to ourselves. But we have to think of the larger picture here, much as I hate to do so," Nick said. "You two could have been killed the other night. Who knows what will come through next time? We can't take the chance of people being endangered by this. On the other hand," Nick ran his hands through his already disheveled hair, "we have a fantastic opportunity for scientific research that didn't exist before."

Stephen's concentration snapped back to what Nick had just said. "Are you saying you want to go through an anomaly?"

"I'd like to look through one. I don't know if I'd want to go further than that, not at this point. Actually, I'm kind of jealous that you've both seen them and I haven't." Nick took a breath and moved into lecture mode. "We don't have any way of controlling when and where they open, or what comes through, or even what era one might open to. The entelodonts prove that it opens to the Eocene or Miocene eras, and the aurochs is from later than that. But what if they also open to places and times that are further in the past? I've been working with the department head on the budget, and I can tell you sincerely that the University does not have the money to deal with a stegosaurus, or an allosaur. I'm not sure we could even deal with the aurochs if it came back and brought friends."

Helen bowed her head, then straightened again slowly. Her face was thoughtful. "I know a man – not well, but my great-aunt lives next-door to his grandmother and they're close friends. James Lester, assistant to somebody in the Home Office. I met him at some events years ago. He's very low-key. He'll look at things, file a report that goes nowhere, advise people that we can have help if we want it, and stay out of the way."

"He's not going to want to make this his personal fiefdom?" Stephen asked, spurred by untold centuries and generations of Harts who as Scots had been on the wrong side of England's official policies.

"Unless he's changed immensely, he'll com here in a Saville Row suit that costs more than a University vehicle, look around, decide it's not his problem and go away again." A smile played with her mouth. "Be very sure to give him your best coffee, Nick, and he'll be your friend forever."

* * *

Because of Home Office scheduling, they went to Lester's office instead, in the heart of the City.

James Lester, undersecretary to an undersecretary of some Home Office department, appeared unlikely to be anyone's friend forever, from what Stephen saw, and even the finest cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain would be unlikely to change that. He seemed as purely a political creature as could be imagined, and behind his half-shuttered eyes a mind like a supercomputer was always at work calculating advantages. But he was more than polite, remembered meeting Helen nearly a decade earlier, congratulated her upon her marriage to Nick, and agreed that the possibility of large intemperate beasts rampaging upon the countryside was certainly a danger to the populace at large.

"However," Lester said, "since you don't have a schedule upon which these things occur, and since so far all the creatures that have emerged from the – what did you call them, anomalies? – have gone back through, there's not much I can do here. I can't ask the military to be on permanent alert for this."

Nick was being patient. "Could you make it possible for us to call for backup if something happens? You know what rural constabularies can be: they're able policemen for everyday matters, but by the time you've managed to explain the emergency and get them to take you seriously there could be far too many people dead. I'd like to be able to place one call and have more suitable assistance."

"Certainly." Lester took out three business cards, scribbled on the back of them with a fountain pen, and handed them across the desk. "My mobile number here is on the front; the first number on the back is my home number, and the second is the number of my superior here, who has influence in a variety of places. I'll make sure he's suitably briefed." He sat back in his chair, his fingers steepled as he leaned his elbows on the desk. "You do realize, once you've called me to alert the military, the situation may well be out of your hands and there may be nothing I can do about it."

Helen opened her mouth to speak, but Stephen got there first. "We understand."

"Thank you for your time," Helen said. "Please say hello to Lady Gertrude for me."

Lester rose from his chair and came around the desk to shake hands with them. "I'd be delighted to, if she ever remembers who I am. She's been confusing me lately with the actor Hugh Grant. I can't say that I'm flattered."

* * *

Now that they had proof, something to work with, Nick began to work carefully to assemble support and assistance. He set Connor to making inquiries with local farmers and villagers about odd trespassers or vandalism, the sort of thing that might occur when some unseen animal got into a yard or garden, and to map the occurrences both on his computer and on a paper map that was kept rolled up under Nick's desk.

"You know, if anything about this gets out before we're able to prove scientifically what we know, we'll be laughed out of the profession," Nick told Connor, who nodded slowly. "You can't tell anyone what we're doing, at this point. Not your flatmates, not your girlfriend, not your mother."

"I won't say a word, Professor," Connor said earnestly. "Mum's not interested, my flatmate couldn't care less about me, long as I pay my share of rent, and I'm between girlfriends."

"See that it stays that way. Not about the girlfriends, mind you." Nick smiled at him.

Stephen, watching this from the other desk, went back to his own work with a smile on his lips. His share of this was to go orienteering with Helen, using the ordinance survey maps to determine likely places for anomalies to occur based on what they knew of the geography where they'd already been seen -- level ground, open areas between trees, small meadows enclosed within the forest – and then visit them together and look for unusual footprints or other evidence of intrusion. He would track whatever he found, he and Helen would document it, and they'd bring it back to the office for analysis.

He didn't mind at all. There were far more places within the Forest of Dean than just one tree, and his flat was on the way back as well.

* * *

The project acquired a new enthusiast the day that he and Helen found a girl with blonde hair sitting near the carpark with her leg twisted and a small green winged lizard that chirped at them cheerfully from its position on her shoulder.

"Hello!" She waved to them, and as they walked toward her Stephen was racking his brain to identify the lizard and coming up blank. "D'you think you could help me a bit? I've sprained my stupid ankle, chasing Rex here, and unfortunately it's the one I need for driving home."

Stephen dropped to one knee to check out the ankle. "Doesn't feel broken. I can wrap it for you if you like." When she nodded, he went to his own car, opened the first-aid kit, came back and began wrapping an elastic bandage around the ankle. "I'm Stephen Hart, and this is Helen Cutter; we're from Central Metropolitan University. Where do you live? Maybe we can help you get home."

"Rex looks pretty interesting," Helen said, leaning down to look at the lizard, who tilted his head and chirped at her. "Where did you find him?"

"I work at the Wellington Zoo, and people are always writing to us about their strange pets. So I went to check out this letter from a boy who said he found a lizard in the Forest of Dean but his mum wouldn't let him keep it, and I said I'd take him. The lizard, not the boy." The girl winced. "Ow."

"Sorry. Nearly done." Stephen straightened a recalcitrant bit of bandage.

"So I came out here with Rex on the way home, to see if there were any more like him around – sometimes people are so stupid, they just throw away their exotic pets in any wild spot – and he flew off for a bit, so I had to chase him, and then I stepped in a hole."

"What kind of lizard is he?" Stephen asked. He realized that the odd shape of the lizard's back was actually a pair of folded wings. _Now we have pet dragons?_

"Well, that's the thing. I'm the lizard expert at the zoo, and I've never seen anything like him. He's fairly tame, and extremely well behaved for a lizard in general, but I'd love to know more. And it's not like he's going to be able to tell me himself, are you, Rex?" She turned her head and the lizard nuzzled her, his long tail curled around her back and his wing ruffling her blonde hair. "Are you doing a study or just out for a walk?"

"We're working on a study on rare wildlife and plants." Helen reached out a hand.

"Abby Maitland, assistant reptile keeper." She shook hands with Helen, and then with Stephen.

"We've got this guy back at the university who can identify almost anything," Stephen said, with a glance at Helen. "And we could stop by there on the way to take you home, if you like."

"We could take you to a doctor, too, if you want," Helen said. "The clinic's not far from the University."

"Won't that mess up your research schedule?" Abby looked concerned. "I don't want to be a bother."

Helen shrugged. "The forest will be here tomorrow."

"Then yes, thanks." Abby came to her feet, with a little help from Stephen, and stood, wavering a little. Rex chose this moment to launch from her shoulder, soar out over the carpark, do a loop, and then come back to land in her arms.

"You didn't find anything else like him out there, did you?" Stephen said. "He's impressive."

"Isn't he?" Abby beamed, her arms full of lizard. "I can hold onto him if you drive. He's not fond of staying in a box."

"I'll drive your car back, if you'll let me," Helen said. Abby immediately handed her the keys.

When they reached the University, afternoon classes had ended and evening classes had not yet started. Stephen found an oversized office chair for Abby to sit in, so she could sling her injured leg over the arm, and pushed her and her armful of curious lizard into the freight elevator at the back of the building, leaving Helen to go up the front way to alert Nick and Connor, both of whom were supposed to be in the office today. He started to apologize for bringing her in by the back way, but Abby shook her head.

"He's not that used to strangers. I don't want him to fly off somewhere that's unfamiliar and get confused." She petted Rex's green scaly head and he stretched his neck and trilled at her.

Stephen wasn't surprised when the elevator door opened to find Nick and Connor standing there, eagerly waiting. "Hello, Miss Maitland, I'm Professor Cutter and this is—"

"Connor Temple, and it's lovely to meet you, and isn't that a beautiful coelurosauravus?" Connor all but bowed to Abby, who smiled up at him. "But you're hurt! Do you want a wheelchair? Crutches? A doctor?"

"How about if we all go into the office before her green friend decides to tour the building?" Nick suggested.

"It's Abby, please. And how did you know what Rex is?"

Stephen smiled at Nick as Connor, still talking a mile a minute, helped her into the smaller office – the one without the fragile exhibit skeletons – where there was space for her chair next to a desk, found a chair for her to prop her foot up on, ran into the other office to grab a book from the shelves, and flipped it open as he brought it back to her. "See, here he is, slightly different coloring but of course the illustrator had no idea of the variations –" He put the book down on the desk in front of her. Helen, who had taken down a book and was reading at the adjacent desk with her feet up, glanced over, smiling.

Abby raised her eyebrows as she read. "It says here that coelurosauravids are extinct. Obviously not."

"Um. Well, that's getting into the project we're working on," Nick said, sitting on a corner of the desk. "We're trying to document extremely rare species that appear within the Forest of Dean; there seems to be evidence there that points to the possibility that small – exceedingly small – populations of some species have managed to survive there when they have died out elsewhere.

"But it doesn't make sense, not even from your book. Rex isn't a cold-weather lizard. He'd never survive a winter at this latitude." Abby shook her head. "The boy who had him said he found Rex in the Forest of Dean, but Rex must have been dumped there by someone who brought him back from a place further south."

"It's possible," Helen admitted. "Even so, he's a very handsome lizard. Are you going to keep him?"

Abby nodded. "I've got a few others at my flat; he won't be lonely."

"That's good," Nick said. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in coming in on our research project with us? Once your ankle has healed, that is?"

"Looking for rare populations of animals? Why not?"

"Well, that's settled, then," Connor said briskly. "Miss Maitl—"

"Abby."

"Abby, would you like a lift to the clinic?"

"Honestly, at this point, I'd love it. Would you hold him for a moment?" She handed Rex off to Connor, who took him hesitantly until Rex snuggled his head under Connor's chin.

"I think it's true love," Stephen murmured to Helen as they watched Connor gently help Abby down to his own car, so he could drive her to the clinic and then home.

"You're probably going to be dragged into helping him ferry her car back to her tomorrow," she reminded him.

"Hell, I'll drive the car myself if it'll get a zoologist onto the project," Nick said. "We're woefully short of people who know anything practical about living animals, though we're pretty good with them if all that's left is a bone or two."

* * *

They weren't halfway through mapping the Forest's various small dells and clearings and making casts of any unusual footprints when Connor's patient enquiries with the local residents began turning up results.

Because, Nick said, it looked better to have two people going door to door, and because Abby was still laid up because of her foot, Stephen and Nick were switching off on accompanying Connor, while Helen continued to check for tracks and anomaly evidence in the Forest of Dean.

Stephen's concern must have shown on his face as he watched Helen drive away from the university, because Nick bumped his shoulder. "Relax. She's the most terrifyingly self-sufficient woman I've ever met, even worse than my grandmum. She'll be fine."

"I know." Stephen turned away from the window. "I don't know how useful I'll be with Connor, comparatively."

"You're a laboratory director in a respected department here, part of an authorized research project of the University, and you're working on your doctorate. Put you beside Connor, who are they going to talk to?"

They looked each other and said, together, "Connor."

"Well, yes. But you can supply the University's authority."

"When did we become 'an authorized project'?" Stephen asked. "I thought you were keeping this a bit under wraps."

"It's pretty hard to do that while using University property without kicking off a departmental audit and all manner of shite," Nick said calmly, "so I talked to the Forest of Dean's Verderers to ask if they'd mind if we did a sort of wildlife survey there. They were all for it, because the Department of Forestry has been cut back –"

"So much for economic recovery," Stephen commented.

"Oh, aye. I also spoke with the High Sheriff of Glocestershire about the project, and she thought it was an excellent idea. And then I went to the Dean and the Chancellor and said we had the support of the Verderers of the Forest of Dean and the High Sheriff in conducting research to look for anomalous plant and animal life there. Oh, and the Biology staff came in on it too, and showed off their giant fern. Apparently the only other place that one's been found is New Zealand, and it isn't common there, either." Nick smiled.

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" Stephen said with a chuckle.

"You bet I am. The Chancellor was fascinated. The Dean wanted to know more about what resources we anticipated needing, but when I said it was mostly the vehicle and the field unit gear, and wouldn't have a heavy impact on the budget, she agreed. " The smile lines around Nick's eyes crinkled. "And, just for laughs, I called the Home Office and Lester gave me a letter saying that we'd contacted him about possibly dangerous animals and that he and the Home Office were prepared to provide us with 'all suitable support' if there were any sort of difficulty."

"Congratulations!" Stephen raised his coffee mug in a toast and clinked it against Nick's. "Game, set and match."

"You'd better believe it. Now, where is that Temple boy?"

Connor came bustling through the door five minutes later. "Sorry, sorry. I was on my way out the door when one of the farmers called me back." He skidded to a stop by the desk, carefully avoiding knocking the Smilodon fatalis skull to the floor. "It seems that his wife found something in the kitchen garden chomping on her greens, but it was so cute she decided to make a pet of it. The farm backs up on the greensward by the Forest, so that's the only place it could have come from. And you won't believe what it is. Or at least what I think it is. Or could be, from the description."

"Well, spit it out, lad, we're all ears."

"An eohippus! Or, to be more precise, a hyracotherium"

"Oh, lord, that's just what we need, a flock of little horses eating everyone's prize cabbage." Nick turned to Stephen. "See? You're going to be very useful for wildlife wrangling, I have no doubt."

"I'm used to wrangling larger wildlife, up to a point." Stephen rested his coffee cup on the desk. "Horses, sheep, the occasional cow …"

"It'll be good experience. Take the spare camera, get photos, measure it as much as possible, and talk to the people. Make sure you tell them we're not in the business of taking away their darling pet, but it's a rare animal and we'd like very much to be allowed to study it sometimes."

"Will do. C'mon, Connor."

* * *

There were two of them, striped and spotted like ground squirrels, with little whiskery tails that were swishing, more in the rhythm of a dog wagging its tail than a horse's casual switch. Mrs. Robert Earl, who introduced herself at the gate of Huntingdon Farm, had put them at first into a loose box in the barn.

"But they're so small, they were getting lost in the hay, so I put them in with old Daisy here, and she made friends with them." She patted the neck of an ancient Shetland pony. "What are they, do you know? I've never seen anything like them."

"They're very rare," Connor told her, his face full of delight as he watched the little creatures play with one another. The old pony put her face down and sniffed them, and they sniffed back and snorted. "In fact, I don't believe there are any others in Britain right now."

"Oh, lord, I was afraid of that. They're that tame, they have to be someone's expensive darlings." Mrs. Earl shook her head. "Where are they from?"

"They're cousins to the rock hyraxes in north Africa," Stephen said. "Browsers. They like fresh grasses and plants, low-growing vegetables, but they generally live in forests. I don't know if they eat grain; the zoologist on our project might know."

"Well, they certainly did like my garden. There's not a stem of broccoli left, and it's a good thing the green beans were past picking. Are they trainable, do you know?"

The little eohippoi were playing tag underneath the pony, around and between its feet as it leaned sociably against the stall door and let Stephen scratch the place at the base of its mane that itched on most horses. One of them reared up, showing them the four toes on each front foot, and the three on each back foot.

"I'm afraid I don't know," Stephen said. "Connor?"

"As far as I'm aware, nobody has ever successfully trained them to do anything. They're so rare, they're more of a curiosity than anything else."

"Ah. I had that hunch. And they're starting to try to chew through the stall, fond as they are of Daisy. See the marks there?"

"I can't be certain about these, but most of them are migratory; they may be wanting to get back to the rest of their herd," Connor said. "It's not an uncommon behavior."

"One of the associated staff on our project is a keeper at the Wellington Zoo," Stephen said. "I'd be glad to take them to her to get them looked over, if you like. Or to try to find their owner, if you're not already attached to them." He could feel Connor holding his breath. "We're not here to take away your pets, not at all. We can bring them right back as soon as she's seen them; you could come along, if you like."

"She injured her leg chasing a lizard; otherwise she'd be with us today," Connor managed, and drew another breath.

Mrs. Earl smiled. "They're darlings, and Daisy does enjoy their company, but Little John is Daisy's usual companion, and she didn't take to them at all." She nodded toward a large tabby cat crouched on a barrel outside the stall who stared toward them without purring. "I've been that worried Little John would hurt them, being jealous and all. And I'd rather they were happy with the rest of their herd. Let me find you the old carrying box; Little John figured out how to open it when I took him to the vet last time, but I don't think that'll be a problem this time. You can bring the box back whenever it's convenient."

As they pulled away from Huntingdon Farm Connor phoned Abby. "Abby. It's Connor. Are you home? Oh, good. We'll be right there. No, it's not that kind of emergency. I think. See you soon."

Stephen glanced over at him. "Did you ever think of going into politics?"

"What, me?" Connor's eyes were round with surprise. "No way. I can't lie well enough."

"Couldn't tell that by the last hour or so."

"You tell me where I said anything that was not strictly true."

"Oh, it was all true. But you bent it around corners very nicely." Stephen smiled. "Politician."

"Look who I've been hanging out with, you and the professor. I learn from the best."

When they reached Abby's flat, she'd left the door unlocked for them. She heard them come in and came to the head of the stairs. "What's your big surprise, Connor?"

Stephen and Connor together were lugging the carrier box up the stairs, not easy as the animals inside it moved around and made anxious noises. "I hope you've got a baby gate for that stair," he said. "You're going to need one."

"It's over there." She hobbled over to get it and set it up as they put the carrier on the floor and opened it. "What – oh, aren't you cute!"

Rex ran over, hopped up on top and looked down curiously as the two sleek little creatures cautiously wandered out. One of them stretched its neck so it could sniff back at Rex, who flicked his tongue out at it; it snorted and ran under the table. The other was investigating a potted plant, which it sniffed and rejected, and then moved on to a long low planter pot with what looked like grass in it. It sniffed, gave a squeaky little whinny, and started to eat.

"Where did you find eohippuses? Eohippi?" Abby beamed at them.

"Eohippoi; from the Greek. Dawn horse. Well, technically, hyracotheria, not Equidae." Connor said.

"I don't care what they're called, they're wonderful." She sank down to sit on the floor, leaning her weight on the table as she did. Her ankle was still strapped up, and she had that foot in a slipper instead of trainers.

"They came out of the Forest into Mrs. Robert Earl's garden and ate their way through it," Connor told her. He sat down cross-legged on the floor next to her. "Stephen talked her into having them brought to our associated zoologist to be checked out properly."

"You really should go into politics, Connor," Stephen said. He turned to Abby. "Should have heard him. Not one lie, but nothing he said was either factual or completely true. What are they eating?"

The two creatures were sharing the contents of the low planter pot, their tails swishing happily.

"Wheat grass. It comes in handy sometimes at the zoo, but I like to have my own supply." Abby looked up at Stephen. "So, what do you want me to do with them? You know I can't keep them here for long, and there's no way I'd let them go over to the zoo. They've never even been indoors before; I couldn't stand it if they were kept in glass rooms for the rest of their lives."

"I've been thinking about that," Stephen sat on the edge of one of Abby's softer chairs; he wasn't sure if he'd be able to get out again if he leaned back. "You look them over, and we'll take photos of them, and measure them, do all the recordkeeping, and then we can take them back to the Forest of Dean and see if they can find their way home."

She nodded slowly. "Okay. I can go with that. Come here, you little beauty, you baby Secretariat, little Seabiscuit – no, you're much prettier than Seabiscuit." She cooed to the smaller of the two, and it consented to eat a little wheatgrass from her hand and allow itself to be touched and petted.

"You know," Connor said suddenly, "it's really too bad at least one of them isn't a Merychippus."

"Should I even ask why?" Stephen raised an eyebrow.

"Well, if they were, and if it were later in the year, I could wish you a very Merychippus and a happy New Year. But they're not, so I can't."

Abby rolled her eyes.

* * *

Stephen pulled the Range Rover onto the verge about a mile from the Earl farm, on one of the old roads kept up by the forestry department. He and Helen had made one pass at mapping possible anomaly points in the area, and there was a small grassy clearing, perhaps the size of a city bus or two, a few hundred yards away.

"They're herd creatures," Abby said. "They'll call out to any others around, and run to find them."

"So if they run back toward the farm, we head them off, right?" Connor asked. "I am all ready for the heading off, if necessary."

"You're going to have to be," Stephen told him. He took the rifle out of the boot, checked to see that it was loaded and slung it over his shoulder. "I'm the designated armed guard."

As soon as Connor and Stephen lifted the carrier out of the vehicle, the creatures' ears pricked forward and they started to whicker in thin, high voices. He set it down quickly, away from the road, and opened it, and they charged out, running into the forest.

Stephen took off after them, keeping them in sight despite their ability to blend with last year's fallen leaves. Behind him he heard Abby say to Connor, "I'll stay with the car this time. Go! You follow them."

Connor caught up to him when he stopped still just before the edge of the clearing, which was filled with the sparkling glow of an anomaly – and a score of little hyracotheria.

"Oh, wow," Connor said reverently, and started taking pictures. The clicking alarmed one of the creatures, whose head came up; it whickered and turned quickly to run into the anomaly, and all the others followed, including the two they had brought with them. "I want to look through." Connor headed toward the anomaly.

"No, I'll look first, just in case there's something with big teeth wandering nearby on the other side."

"Oh, so you get bitten first?"

"Look, one of us has to stay on this side to pull the other out if it starts to close. I don't know about you, but I've no intention of losing my head that way."

"Ow. I see your point." Connor held up his hands. "Where do you want me to grab on, so to speak?"

"Back of the belt. If anything looks odd, get me out fast."

"Gotcha."

Stephen took a deep breath and put his face in between the facets of light that glowed. He didn't know what they were, but he could feel them against his skin like the touch of tissue paper, insubstantial and soft, of no particular temperature. When he opened his eyes his face felt warmer air, and brighter sunlight, and he saw a rolling plain covered with hundreds of smaller and larger herbivores, from the hyracotheria to a giant ground sloth ambling toward a tree. Something that looked like a deer or elk was off to the left, and behind the sloth he saw –

He felt himself yanked backward suddenly, so that he fell on his arse on the ground a good two meters back. His face stung with its return to cooler air. "What –"

"Look."

The anomaly was shifting, pulsing, the edges dimming and sharpening. Suddenly it winked out.

"Thanks." He got to his feet, still visualizing the grassy plain and the distant green hills.

"What did you see?" Connor asked. "More hyracotheria and all sorts of other creatures in their natural habitat?"

Stephen nodded slowly. "Open plains. Bright sunshine. Late summer, I think." He glanced up at the grayish sky. "Beautiful."

Before they reached the carpark, Abby waved to them. "I just got a call from Cutter. We have to get back to the University."

Stephen flipped his own phone on and pressed speed dial. "Cutter?"

"Stephen, thank god. Are Connor and Abby with you?"

"Yeah, we've been together the whole afternoon." He didn't like the tone of Nick's voice. "What's happened?"

"Something large and predatory has come through an anomaly, broken the fence by the carpark and taken several cattle from a local farm." The strained tone in his voice grew as Nick said, "And Helen's disappeared."

"Where are you?"

"I had to call Lester, and he called out the troops. The place is swarming with military; be sure you have your University identification to get through. I'm at the car park."

"We'll be there soon," Stephen said, and closed the phone. "Something big and nasty came through near the carpark, and Helen's missing," he told the others.

* * *

They all had to show ID to get through the police and the Special Forces troops, but driving the University vehicle helped; Nick had apparently told whoever was there to expect them. When they found him he was standing near a section of cast-iron fence that had been ripped from the ground and crumpled like a plastic bag. The dirt beyond the carpark was covered with large prints, going out of the Forest and back in again, and crisscrossed with human boot prints from the military.

As he was reading the ground, Nick said, "She was about a mile that way," he pointed, "and these tracks go there."

That way. Not toward their safe haven above the river, but toward the high hills, to a narrow clearing in a hollow in the hills half-filled with fallen trees from a rockslide, where anyone trying to make speed would be at a severe disadvantage.

He felt his heart pound. "I'd like to see the trail."

"Stephen's our tracker, none better," Nick said to someone. When Stephen looked up he saw James Lester, in a gray Saville Row chalk-stripe suit and heliotrope-striped shirt, standing next to Nick.

Lester nodded. "Go with him," he said to a sergeant, who nodded.

The sergeant looked him over, his eyes widening in recognition. "Aren't you Hart, from the Olympic shooting team?" When Stephen nodded, the sergeant said to his captain, "He's licensed, and a better shot than I am."

"By all means, arm him," Lester said.

Stephen was handed the same high-powered rifle and ammo as the soldiers carried. He was glad he'd left his own target rifle in the rover's boot; this had a bit more of a chance of stopping something the size of an entelodont, though even the entelodonts hadn't attempted to tear out iron fencing.

Nick was pale, his hands shoved in his pockets to keep them from shaking. Stephen was glad that Abby and Connor were there; Nick shouldn't be left alone right now. "If she's there I'll bring her back."

"I know you will." Nick 's pale eyes blazed. He gave Stephen a short nod and let himself be taken aside by Connor so he wouldn't have to watch Stephen disappear between the trees.

They went at the speed that Stephen could read the tracks, and he narrated the progress to the sergeant, who relayed it back to the others on the mobile attached to his shoulder. Here, the tracks had doubled, as if there had been two beasts, no, the same one unless it had been circling – yes, it had circled a tree that had been half-uprooted –

_oh… Helen, you and your trees…_

\-- and then broke away toward this direction, up and along the rocks –

_yes, a shred of scarf on a broken branch but no blood_

– bits of low-lying vegetation uprooted and thrown aside as if by heavy strong feet, and rocks themselves dislodged and moved an inch or two so that the gaps where they had been showed clearly.

He and the sergeant climbed the crest of the hill as quickly as possible while tracking. He scanned the other side, concentrating on the small gap in the hillside where a stream had carved a small gap over the years; the last spring's heavy rains had caused a landslide there. Stephen stared at the trees, willing there to be an anomaly, a glow, something he could deal with, something he could go into to get her back, but there was nothing. The sergeant evidently thought they'd stopped to catch a breath, and did, but Stephen went onward steadily and the sergeant hurried to catch up.

There was the landslide, and beyond it the space where the fallen trees had slid downhill, partly filling the small, narrow hollow and its stream, which was nearly dry at the moment.

_blood on a rock_

Stephen paused only long enough to open a small plastic bag, push it inside out, wipe up some of the blood and seal it again. He put it in his pocket for later and kept going.

They reached the finger of the hill just above the landslide. Stephen held out one hand, listening. Birdsong. No thundering noise of any large bodies in the woods, nothing that might be dimmed by the sound absorption of thousands of trees, only the usual sounds of birds and squirrels and small creatures going about their lives.

_More tracks, leading downward, a bit more blood_

He took another sample.

_ Smallish fallen wood broken, and medium fallen wood dislodged – some pieces looked as if they'd been pulled up and thrown aside--_

The tracks were marked deeply into the silt and mud that the stream had washed down through centuries of erosion. The fallen trees had blocked easy access across the entire area, but many of the smaller ones had been dislodged from where they'd first fallen. From the crisscrossed tracks it was clear that Helen had dodged, ducked under the larger fallen logs, slipped, regained her footing and run across the hollow several times, finally running directly into the center of it, followed by the heavy tracks. Both sets of tracks disappeared as they hit the patch of open ground where they would be most visible.

She had gone into the anomaly to escape her pursuer.

Stephen knelt next to the last few footsteps. She had dropped her shredded old cotton kerchief there, and the creature following her had trodden it into the mud. Something hard was twisted into the cloth, and Stephen felt the outline of a ring.

"She's not here." His voice tasted harsh in the back of his throat.

"What do you mean? She's got to be here," the sergeant said, glancing wildly about as if Helen might materialize from tree bark and rock.

"There are – you look at the tracks. She's gone."

They made their way back, Stephen ranging more widely than before from the path, just in case she had managed to dodge whatever had been chasing her, scramble up a tree and come back another way, but any time he found her bootprints away from the trail she and the creature had made, they were overlaid by animal tracks, probably from her earlier trips here to assess the site.

When they reached the area near the carpark where the others were waiting, he handed the gun and the ammo back to the sergeant with a nod of thanks, and walked straight over to Nick. He took Nick's hand and put the kerchief in it. "She's not there."

"No."

"She was moving well, she wasn't injured, but she's gone in. Followed by whatever it was."

Nick's hand clutched the bit of material, and his eyes closed. His shoulders started to sag but they stiffened. He pressed his eyelids together and opened his eyes again. "So there's a chance –"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"I'm sorry, could you please put that into English?" Lester, who had been standing by and listening, took a step toward Stephen.

Stephen turned toward him, gathering in Abby and Connor with a glance. He didn't want to have to say it twice; once was difficult enough. "Helen Cutter was chased by a large creature, probably the same one that uprooted that fence." Lester's frowning attention focused on him fiercely as he continued. "I think she went uphill because she thought it would give her more of a chance to get away, slowing whatever was chasing her, but that didn't work because the creature was faster and stronger than she expected. She climbed a tree to try to get away from it, a good-sized oak about eighty years old, and the creature knocked it halfway over to get her out, though it didn't climb the tree. So she went up over the crest of the hill, hoping to slow it or get it off her trail in the ravine, and that didn't work either. It chased her under the logs, dislodged some of them to get at her. Finally she took the only route she had left and went into the anomaly." He took a breath. "It followed her there, and then the anomaly closed."

Lester frowned. "So if she's alive, where is she now?"

"Somewhere in the past, but we don't know where." Nick's voice sounded as rough as if he'd been chugging Laphroag. "The anomalies lead to other times, and sometimes to other places, or so we've been able to deduce. We haven't been through them."

"I looked through one earlier today, very briefly," Stephen said.

"What?" Nick swerved.

"We found the one that the hyracotheria came through and sent them back. I looked through for a moment, and Connor pulled me back out. It looked like the American plains in the Eocene era."

"He only had his head stuck through," Connor said. "The rest of him was here."

"So it is possible to go through and come back," Nick mused.

"Apparently so, making this even more of a mess than before." Lester took out his Blackberry. "How much progress has been made in researching these anomalies?"

"We know a lot of the areas within the forest where they're likely to appear," Connor answered, after a glance at Nick and Stephen. "Stephen and Helen were checking for different sorts of tracks showing up at those areas and taking plaster casts of any that were found, so we can make an educated guess at what eras they were. But except for Stephen, nobody's been through up to now."

"I suppose you can't predict when they will open?"

"Nobody can, not yet. So far they don't seem to switch eras; if an anomaly goes to a certain time, it doesn't suddenly decide to go to another one." Stephen had been watching Nick. "I'll be glad to answer any questions you want to ask me, but I think I'd better get Professor Cutter home."

"I can drive myself," Nick said, though without conviction.

Lester nodded, and when he spoke his voice was measurably softer. "Professor, I am very sorry, and I will make sure that everything that can be done will be done. For now, please do go home, and we will contact you the moment we know anything." He turned to Stephen. "You know there will be an official inquiry; where can you be reached?"

"If I'm not at the office at the University, or at my flat, I'll be at the professor's house." He gave Lester his mobile number, then handed his keys to Connor. "Take Abby home." Connor nodded solemnly; Abby was in tears.

"Wait a moment," Stephen said. When he'd taken the keys from his pocket his hand had dislodged the two plastic sample bags. He handed them to Lester, who eyed them with distaste. "We found two blood samples on the trail. I don't know if it's from Helen or what was chasing her. It might help identify the creature." Lester's face cleared; he nodded sharply, took a perfectly ironed linen handkerchief from his pocket, folded it around the samples and placed it back in his pocket.

Nick was still standing, staring at the crest of the hill, gripping the torn kerchief in his hand so hard that his knuckles were white. Stephen put a hand on his arm, and Nick nodded once, slowly, and went with him.

* * *

They were more than halfway home when Nick said, "I know why the ring is here."

Stephen cast him a sideways look but said, "Hmm?" Nick's car had a pull in the steering column that needed repair; he had to concentrate to stay on the road. It should go into the shop soon.

"Helen's grandfather worked in one of the assembly-line machine shops during the War; he lost a finger because his wedding ring got tangled in the mechanism. She used to leave hers home when she went out on the moors, or over here, because she was worried it might get her hurt." Tears were moving slowly down his cheeks, though his eyes were open. "It's not a rejection, Stephen. It's a promise that she'll come back if she can."

"I know she will," he said, and concentrated on driving.

Once they were back, he saw Nick into the front room, near the piano that Nick had inherited from his mother and that he'd heard Nick play occasionally on a late night, ragtime and bits of early jazz and some sections of Chopin preludes. He got Nick a glass with two fingers of Talisker, excused himself and went into the kitchen at the back to phone the Dean to let her know what had happened and to arrange for Nick's classes to be covered for a week, at least. The Dean had demurred briefly, suggesting that Stephen should cover them, but Stephen had said, "I'm staying with him for now."

"Of course, of course," the Dean said, and agreed to make arrangements. "If there's anything you need – "

"Just some leave time for him for now. Anything else, I'll call. Thank you, Dean," he said, and hung up.

Nick was standing in the same place when Stephen came back into the room, leaning his back against the piano and looking at the bookshelves. The lines on his face stood out, and for the first time Stephen really saw the thin gray streaks in Nick's sandy hair.

"When's the last time you ate?"

"Hm? I don't know. Breakfast, I think."

It was nearly sunset outside. "I'll cook you something."

"I'm no' an invalid; I can manage for myself, thank you." Nick, biting his head off, was at least reacting.

"I'll eat with you, then."

Stephen rummaged in the fridge and the cupboards and managed to assemble a hot meal, sliced ham and leftover beans and some kind of salad and a bit of leftover curry from the take-out place around the corner. Nick ate dutifully, though without apparently noticing what he was eating. He didn't touch the scotch until after dinner.

"You get yourself a glass," he told Stephen, who nodded and went to pour himself a finger of Oban, though for a moment his hand hesitated on the Laphroag bottle. He stuck with the milder flavor, though, if only to retain his wits.

When Stephen sat down again at the kitchen table, Nick raised his glass.

"Here's to Helen, safe journey home." Nick's voice broke. "Here's to my love."

The tide of emotion within Stephen broke, and he clinked his glass against Nick's. "Here's to Helen."

They both threw the scotch back into their throats and swallowed hard. It was a good excuse for their eyes to swim, for them both to feel a little dizzy. Stephen knew all the ways that quiet men could mourn; he put a hand on Nick's arm. "I'll stay if you like, or I'll leave if you'd rather be alone."

"Stay, please." Nick managed a wistful smile. "Remember when you took refuge with me after your tent split? Now I'm takin' refuge with you, only it's still my tent."

Stephen nodded. "I'm here, as long as you like."

"Thanks." Nick rubbed his face. "Oh, lord, I've got to call Carlotta. She shouldn't hear about this from Lester." He reached for the old land-line phone on the kitchen counter, but his hands were shaking so that he could barely pick up the receiver.

"Here; I'll place the call." Stephen punched in the numbers and handed the phone to Nick, and then got up to leave but Nick put a hand on his arm, so he stayed. When the call was over Nick hung up the phone, and turned to Stephen.

"Bring the bottle over."

He helped Nick up the stairs two hours later and into bed, taking his shoes off and tucking him under a comforter. But Nick wouldn't let of his sleeve, so he lay down there too, in the big bed, on the side where Helen had probably slept, and although he didn't expect to be able to close his eyes he fell asleep to the sound of Nick's rough breathing, one hand on Nick's shoulder, and the faint floral scent of Helen's shampoo all around him from her pillow.

In the morning he rolled out of bed first, ducked into the bathroom at the end of the hall for a quick shower, dressed in some of the clothes he kept in the spare room, and went down to make breakfast. When Nick showed up, unshaven, with lines like canyons carved into his face, Stephen gave him the choice of a bowl of salted porridge, a plate of plain eggs, a left-over slice of ham browned on the grill washed down with a cup of the strong lift-the-varnish navvy tea that Nick customarily drank at home. Nick sat down and ate it all, would not let Stephen do the washing-up, put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed it hard. "I'm going out walking," he said.

"Do you want company?"

Nick shook his head. "Not today. I'll take my mobile. If –"

Stephen nodded. "I'll be here." He watched Nick head up the long walking trail into the hills, with a bottle of water, sat down on the couch by the phone in the front room and read journals, books, whatever came to his hand. Afterward he could never recall what it was he'd looked at, thought odd facts from what he'd read occasionally came to mind in a disconnected fashion, like the beads scattered on the floor from a broken strand.

* * *

Over the next week, their schedule worked itself out. Stephen would get up, go to the University, take care of Nick's office hours and his own work, and stay in contact with Connor and Abby, both of whom were frustrated by the interference Lester's people were making in their efforts to do research on the Forest. Connor was more upset than Abby, who had her zookeeping work to keep her busy; as a result Connor hung around the office more, silent, cross-referencing the maps and his and Helen's notes with the casts of ancient footprints and hoofprints.

And the Dean stopped by the office to talk to Stephen. After consultation with the Chancellor, Professor Cutter was being offered a year's sabbatical from teaching, to continue his work on the rare animals project. It was coming a year earlier than usual, but with Helen's disappearance and with the impetus of the project, it seemed reasonable to do that.

"I thought it would be best to speak to you first, as you've seen more of Professor Cutter while he's been on leave," the Dean said. "Chancellor's aware, as I am, that he's not going to give up looking for Helen. Might as well give him the space he needs to work in for a year, if he's up to it. Entirely his choice, please make sure he realizes that."

"There'll be an official letter, I expect?" Stephen said.

"Yes, of course. We have already sent an official statement of sympathy, carefully worded. This is our offer of assistance, in whatever way Cutter wishes to avail himself of it," the Dean said quietly. "Terrible thing, Helen going missing. Such a gifted teacher. She will be sorely missed. I don't mind telling you that the University had decided to offer her a full professorship, well deserved."

"Yes," he said. "An excellent teacher."

Nick had the Chancellor's letter in his hand when he arrived that evening; it had been hand-carried to the house. "They're giving me the sabbatical now, a year early, so I can continue the search."

"That's good, isn't it?"

Nick nodded. "And continued support for the project, which means the vehicle and equipment and so on. I don't know if you had any hand in this, but if you did, thank you."

He shook his head. "It's not my doing. If anything, it's Helen's." And he told Nick about the offer that Helen would have received.

"Ah. She deserves it; she's worked so hard. I expect she'll like it very much when she's back," Nick said. "All we've got to do is get her here."

* * *

And then there was the official visit from the local police, where he was brought down to the station to assist with their enquiry:

Yes, he had been working with Helen Cutter on the project, which had official approval from the Chancellor and the Dean. He described what they had been doing in the Forest. Yes, they had been alone there at times, and once had been chased by wild boar. Yes, they could be terrible animals.

Yes, the Forester had been kept informed, knew about their work and approved it. Yes, it was a pity that the Forestry Department's budget had had to endure cutbacks.

No, on that day he had not been with her. Helen was very physically fit and very capable of taking care of herself. He had been conducting inquiries with Connor Temple, a student, and with Abby Maitland, who was a zookeeper. Yes, the police could certainly verify his movements with both of them and with Mrs. Earl.

What had happened to the animals he and Mr. Temple had removed from the Earl farm? They had been taken to Miss Maitland to check out their health?

And then the officer had come in, saying that there was a call from a James Lester at the Home Office, and all enquiries were to go through the Home Office from this point forward, thank you very much for your assistance Mr. Hart you can go now.

* * *

On his way home he stopped in at the local. Only then did it occur to him that it was Thursday, late afternoon. A few of the other postgraduate students came up to the bar where he stood, and asked him to come back and sit with them for a while.

He ordered a half-pint of cider, to be polite, and went to sit on the end of the bench in the booth, to nod to the others who were trying carefully not to say anything offensive or overly curious, but who also were asking if there might be anything they could do for Professor Cutter, who was well liked. After half an hour he gave them what smile he could manage, finished his cider and left. He picked up the mail at his flat, went in and walked around – Helen had had her own key and had occasionally stopped there for his good tea before heading back to campus – and went back to make one pass around the University before going back to the house. He knew that Nick would have spent all day going through every page that Helen had ever written on the project, all her dictated and scrawled notes, anything that could give them a clue as to where she could be.

"We have to be ready," he would say to Stephen. "There's no way to know when it'll open again. We have to be ready to go in and help her, if we can."

Unspoken between them, by now, was the thought: if they let us. Even Lester couldn't have stopped them once they'd gone through.

* * *

The anomalies kept opening, whether they were attentive or not. Stephen and Nick had built a good relationship with the Forester so that whenever something was reported to him he passed it directly along to them. As a result the team managed to reach the anomalies much sooner, and have a better chance to return animals through them.

They had been lucky, Stephen realized, so lucky that so few of the creatures that emerged had been dangerous. There had been the enormous varanid, which Connor had described as the great-grandfather of a monitor lizard, that hissed and chased them and that had to be herded back through with a section of wire fencing held between two armoured Hummers. There had been the medium-sized amphibian that wandered out, confused, and unable to find water soon enough, and that had died before being able to return. That carcass had gone into a classified Home Office freezer that Lester was dedicating to the project, for when there were biologists with sufficient clearances to do a proper examination.

The family of small rodent-like mammals, that Nick said were some of the most ancient mammals to survive the Permian collapse, were the hardest to get rid of. They seemed to have been born pregnant. It took Abby and Rex nearly a week to find the last of them, because Rex apparently thought of them as the lizard-equivalent of wind-up toys and enjoyed swooping down to chase them out from under leaves. By that time the anomaly had closed, so some of them went home with Abby to live in two glass enclosures, separated by sex. Abby was reluctant to do it – "it'll disrupt their social patterns" – but agreed that separation was far better than having to deal with an oversupply of them.

"If they were only baby mice, I wouldn't have problems feeding them to some of the lizards, but seeing as how they're primordial ancestors of us all, it feels a bit odd," she said.

The other difficult customer was near the other end of the spectrum for size, though still mammalian. It was Connor who nearly backed into a lost Pleistocene ground sloth as he was stepping backward from an anomaly. Fortunately he heard the creature bleat angrily before swinging a three-clawed front foot at him, and jumped out of the way.

"Abby! Help!"

She and Stephen arrived at the same time. "What the – "

"That's a very nice _Nothrotherops shastensis_, Connor. Congratulations," Stephen said.

"Are you going to shoot it, Abby?" Connor watched the creature start to lumber toward him to line up another swing. It was nearly as tall as he was, with long front legs and a sturdy tail.

"It's a sloth, Connor, it's nearly asleep most of the time." But she lined up a shot, and the sloth slumped over. They took photos, recorded its measurements, noticed what it had been eating (young birch leaves and branches). It was Connor's turn to put his head through, carefully, with the others holding onto him, and he reported that all was clear, so they cautiously rolled the creature onto a low cart and pushed the cart through just before the anomaly closed.

"We're going to have to put in a budget item for carts," Nick said later at the house. "That's such a good way of sending them back."

"Couldn't we just get them second-hand on the Worldnet or something?" Connor asked. "I mean, it's not like they're going to be reused a lot of the time. It's kind of a one-way vehicle."

"Is there any chance that sending something metal and rubber back into the past is going to upset the future?" Abby wondered.

"We could see about getting wooden carts, I suppose, though they might be more costly." Nick was flipping through a warehouse supply catalog. "If they even exist any more."

Stephen, who had been cleaning the tranquilizer rifle and adjusting the tension on its trigger on Abby's request, said, "The University has a lot of old packing skids back behind the gym; don't some of them come with casters or something?" He watched Connor get that inventor's look in his eye.

"That's brilliant. Abby, your car holds more than mine."

Before Abby had time to protest, Nick handed Connor the key to the Range Rover. "No dents, and vacuum the back when you're done."

By the same time the next day, they had three low, wheeled carts with removable handles that would hold a quarter ton each. The only cost had come from a trip to the DIY store for casters, screws and a handy combination drill and screwdriver, all of which came to less than a third of the cost of one metal cart in the catalog.

* * *

For several weeks Nick ended each day with a bit more scotch than Stephen thought healthy, though he said nothing. One night Nick stopped drinking, the next morning started walking more, and after a week more went back to the University to teach, telling Stephen that he had been on leave long enough. He was his usual self with the students, forthright but kind, and with the staff, though he simply became silent at times and said nothing, or walked away from conversations. Stephen, behind him, had raised an eyebrow sardonically at whoever had been talking, and that had taken care of it.

"I think I can manage now," Nick told Stephen a week or so later. "I'm very grateful that you stayed, but you need to go back to your life."

_You are my life. You and Helen were my life and you're all that's left._

"Take a break," Nick went on. "Go home to visit your folks."

"I might go up to London to see my sister," he said after a moment.

"Good. Say hello for me; she's a bright girl." Nick had met her briefly the year before when she'd stopped by for a visit before starting a new job in the City.

They had finished their breakfast, but this time Nick walked to the University along with him, and at the end of the day Stephen went back to his empty flat alone.

* * *

He phoned home to see how things were going, and found that the family, as usual when it wasn't the holidays, was scattered all over the place.

"Mum and Da are in New Zealand, visiting Mum's friend Cora," Dermot told him. "I'm here, but I have to go to Brussels for a banker's conference next week. And Veronica's between jobs – and engaged."

"Engaged? When did that happen? And who is he?" Stephen hadn't even tried to keep track of Veronica's romantic situations since they were in secondary school and she'd been crazy about the handsome maths teacher.

"I'll give you her new mobile number; you can ask her." Dermot said. "You could come to Brussels with me, but you'd be bored silly."

Veronica was more forthcoming. "Stephen! When are you coming to meet my future husband? You didn't answer when I phoned you. Bad brother."

"I have some time off coming," he told her. "Sorry I've been out of reach; I've been busy helping out my friend whose wife disappeared."

"I heard." Her voice softened. "I'm so sorry, it must be absolute hell for him. And for you; she's a friend, right?"

"Yes," he admitted. "We were close friends."

"Well, you do need the break then. If you can wait until next week before coming it would be best; I'm dreadfully busy until then. Reggie is taking me to make my bow to the Queen at this formal event on Thursday."

"Make your bow to the Queen? What about all your Scots nationalist and democratic sentiments?" he teased.

"Oh, I still have them, but Reggie is The Honourable Reginald Quincy Vincent St. Johns, and it's expected. It'll probably be a bore, but I have something nice to wear and I'll show you all the photos when you're here." She gave him a very brief rundown of how they'd met in the Tube, when he'd accidentally picked up her package instead of his own and she'd had to run down the platform after him in order to make sure she had hers back. "It was very expensive underthings," she said. "Not his size."

She had him laughing, as she always did. "So, when do I get to meet him, presumably without your underthings in his possession?"

"A week from Friday, of course. Come up on the train and I'll meet you, and you can be introduced to the Ronnie and Reggie Show. We're going to be brilliant together, you know."

"I'm looking forward to it," he said. He felt more lighthearted afterward, though his break was delayed a week. Spending time with Veronica was something he looked forward to. Abby reminded him of Veronica at times, but nothing could match his sister for sheer silly fun.

He told Connor and Abby that he was going to be up in London for a week. "Can you take care of things while I'm gone? Cutter's back taking office hours, but it would be good if you could stop by every day or two and check for phone messages."

"Sure, no problem," Connor assured him. "I have more data to show the Professor; I have the eras matched with all past known anomalies for which we have casts or any evidence at all."

"Good. He'll like that."

"You have a good time," Abby told him. "You need it."

"I plan to. Next time my sister's here, you should meet her. I think you'd get on very well."

"Absolutely," she said, beaming at him. "But you know we'll go out for a drink and tell stories about you."

"I think I'll survive. One other thing," Stephen said. "I know you've both wanted to pick up the work Helen and I were doing, tracking anomalies in the Forest. Please wait until I'm back to do it; don't go in alone." The two of them exchanged a glance that Stephen had no trouble interpreting. "What have you been doing?"

"Taking Rex in to see if he can find them. That's how I located the last three," Connor said.

"We go in together," Abby added. "And I have marksman's training; I carry the tranquilizer rifle with me. I'm licensed through the work at the zoo."

"Would you put off any further trips until I'm back? I'd rather be there myself with something that doesn't just shoot happy-juice darts at the creatures."

Connor opened his mouth, but Abby jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow.

"Agreed," she said.

Stephen nodded. "I know it's irksome not to go ahead, but Cutter wants to start going in with us; I'd like to set up teams to do this, so nobody's alone."

"Oh, of course." Connor nodded solemnly. "Besides, I have enough to do here."

"I can help more," Abby said. "If you want."

"What about the zoo?" Stephen asked.

Abby shrugged. "Budget cuts. I've been there long enough that they'll keep me on if they can, but if you can fit me in anywhere as well, it would be good.

"I'll talk to Cutter," Stephen promised. "He's been very glad from the start that you agreed to help us; he'll do what he can."

* * *

He'd be catching the train in the morning, so he was already packed. No sense in eating at home and having dishes to do. He was tucking into a shepherd's pie at the Pig-In-A-Poke when Connor and Abby burst through the pub door, glanced around and ran over to his table.

"Stephen –" Connor looked frantic. Abby looked worried.

"What's happened? Is Cutter all right?" He put his fork down, swallowed hard on that last bite of crust.

"You haven't seen the news today, have you?" Abby asked. "And your phone's turned off. And --" she glanced toward the bar, "there's no telly in here."

He shook his head. "Helen –"

"No, Stephen, listen." Connor let his voice drop. "Your brother called the office; he couldn't reach your mobile so we came to find you."

His mind swept through the possibilities: a plane crash somewhere between Scotland and Auckland, something wrong with Dermot's adored wife or three-year-old son.

It was Abby who spoke, and her voice shook. "Stephen, I'm so sorry. There was an explosion in London, at the Queen's reception."

"Veronica –"

"Nobody survived, Stephen. Nobody."

"What do you mean, nobody survived?" Stephen pushed aside the rest of his supper and ran out of the pub into the street, which was crowded with people. He pushed his way through the crowd into the Lion's Pride, three doors down, whose telly had an oversized screen to please the soccer fans.

The telly showed a scene of devastation: burnt grass and trees, flames still licking at the edges of chairs and the trimmings on festival tents, emergency vehicles flashing lights, and the lengthening row of bodies covered by white cloths streaked with red. Firefighters working to contain a blaze that consumed ornamental trees not far from the windows set into the stone palace. The palace's first and second level window frames held only cracked, jagged shards of glass; the draperies visible through the windows hung crookedly, in tatters.

The news announcer couldn't be heard for the noise in the pub, but the banner streaking across the bottom of the screen spoke of a dissident group, explosives smuggled into the event via a caterer's truck, and the worst words of all.

No survivors.

The barman adjusted the volume and the newscaster's voice blared forth, "The Honourable Zara Philips, daughter of the late Princess Royal, whom illness had kept from the event, was awakened half an hour ago by the acting deputy prime minister and the Yeoman of the Guard, to be informed that she has succeeded to the throne of Great Britain. From a position twelfth down in the royal succession, she is now Queen Zara I, all others before her and many further down on the list as well unfortunately having been killed in the explosion –"

He could stand no more of it. He bullied his way back out of the pub, hearing behind him Connor's quiet, "Sorry. His sister --" in apology for him. Once on the street, he sank down on the bench at the bus stop, with his face in his hands.

He couldn't –

_Veronica, laughing about underwear, promising to show him a good time with her fiancé_

No. It couldn't be.

He came back to the present to find Abby sitting on one side of him and Connor on the other, both of them with their hands on his shoulders. "Stephen, is there anywhere you'd like us to drive you?"

He drew a breath that shook him. It was the first breath he'd ever consciously drawn while knowing that he would never see Veronica again, and it racked him in a way that Helen's disappearance had not.

He couldn't face his flat, with the packed suitcase, everything put away so he wouldn't be coming back to a mess.

"Take me to Cutter's house, please."

"Of course," Abby said. They helped him make way through the crowd to where Abby's car was parked, and drove him the few miles that he would normally think nothing of running in any weather. Abby went slowly, dodging pedestrians until they were outside the village itself.

Nick met them at the door. "Oh, my poor Stephen," he said, "come in, come in." He walked forward and put his arms around Stephen, who nearly broke down. "I am so sorry, my friend. I am so sorry."

Connor and Abby, in the background, must have said something, because Nick nodded to them, and they went away. Nick drew him into the house, into the front room, where he sat on the couch until Nick put a glass in his hand and sat next to him.

Stephen put the glass down on the table, his hand shaking. "What have you heard?" His voice didn't sound right to himself. "I need to know. I can't stand to watch anything."

"A group of political dissidents set off some kind of bomb in the midst of the Queen's garden party at Buckingham Palace. It wasn't small. I don't know how it was disguised, but the bomb dogs didn't find it until just before it went off; it might even have been a chain of bombs, for all I know. I don't know much about that." Nick's voice sounded apologetic, as if Stephen might upbraid him for being less than knowledgeable about explosives and such things.

"What they are saying is that the concussion blast of the explosion killed more people than the actual bomb. It was so powerful that everyone within the palace gates was killed instantly, and the Coldstream guards on duty immediately outside the gate were severely injured." Nick paused. "If your sister and her man were there… it was instantaneous. She wouldn't have had time to be afraid, or hurt."

Stephen nodded. "I have to call my brother."

"I know. Do you want me to step into the kitchen?"

Stephen shook his head.

Dermot was in much the same shape as Stephen. He managed to say that yes, the authorities had identified Veronica and Reginald, and that they would release her for burial soon. Her death appeared to have been instantaneous; she had not been much injured. Dermot was going to call him back when arrangements had been made. Yes, of course he should bring friends; there was plenty of room at the house. Mum and Da had seen the news already and had booked a flight; they would be back tomorrow. Dermot's voice dropped off into silence and they both hung up.

There was a knock at the door and Nick went to answer it; he came back with Stephen's University rucksack. "It's Connor; he brought some things for you from your place. I loaned him the key you gave me; didn't think you'd mind."

Stephen shook his head. Better that someone else would go through his things today than that he'd have had to do it. At least when he did go back now, it would not be to a perfectly organized flat that would remind him of the trip he would not take. It would have a few small things out of place, and he'd leave them that way for a while, the book sitting on the table instead of shelved, the closet door open a little, the tea thermos empty on the sideboard.

The desolation that had arisen within him from the moment he saw the news broadcast rose higher, as if it were the lump in his throat become too large to swallow, too heavy to ignore any longer. He put his face into his hands and sobbed, and Nick put his arms around him and let him put his head on his shoulder, and held him until his eyes were dry and his heart ached with the hollow empty place, the gap where he knew he'd never be anyone's big brother again.

"Come upstairs to bed," Nick said quietly. "You'll need your rest."

Stephen shook his head. "I don't want to go to sleep; I won't be able to stop seeing the pictures."

"Stephen. You didn't let me be alone; it's the least I can do for you." Nick's voice was very gentle. "Come upstairs with me."

Stephen paused. At length he nodded and went upstairs with Nick, and lay on one half of Nick's big bed while Nick lay on the other, and if Stephen's pillow was soaked with tears by morning Nick never said a word. And after a while, with Nick's hand on his shoulder anchoring him to this world, Stephen dropped off to sleep.

* * *

All of them wanted to come with him, but Abby couldn't get off work and Connor had to be there in case an anomaly opened, as well as to mind the office. So it was only Nick who took the train north with Stephen, sitting quietly nearby with a book or looking out the window, as Stephen always did, watching the landscape pass and change. Everything is change, he thought. Everything changes, and the changes make us change. Nothing will be the same now.

She was buried in the family plot by the old village church. Nick stood with him, shoulder to shoulder, as her casket was lowered. His parents were in terrible shape, barely holding together. He and Dermot looked at each other, then stepped forward together to pick up one handful of dirt each to put into the grave.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done. He could feel the damp grit on his fingers for hours afterward, no matter that he'd washed his hands twice.

Afterward, at the reception, people knew enough not to expect him to talk. He kept a drink in his hand, nodded when he needed to, and sat over by the fireplace. Nearby he could hear Nick talking about their work at the University, about his research into the past, all suitably reworded for people who didn't often deal with scientific terminology.

His mother, who had made it through the service but nearly crumbled as she stood by the grave, had done the polite thing for half an hour and had retired upstairs, but his father had recovered enough composure to be able to circulate through the crowd. He heard his father say something to Nick, thanking him for coming with Stephen.

"Your son Stephen bids fair to become one of the bright lights in our profession. You must be very proud of him." Nick's voice had that burr of absolute honesty.

In his corner, Stephen sat very still, letting the sound of Nick's voice sink through him, comforting him.

* * *

He lay in his old bed at home that night, listening to the familiar sound of the breeze blowing through the trees by the house, and just let himself feel. Be body, he told himself, not emotions, not thoughts.

_Be body._

And two images rose to the top of his mind and rested there, clear as photographs, letting him look at them for a long time before fading away.

One was Veronica, sitting next to him on the dock by the lake, dangling her feet in the water. They had just swum their horses on the hottest day of summer, and were drying off before riding them back. He was sixteen, she was fourteen, and even though most people thought it wasn't cool to hang out with your kid sister, he thought she was a lot of fun. She'd been arguing with the rector again, giving Mum the pip, though Da thought it was funny and stood up for her.

"Do you ever think about heaven?" she'd asked him, and he'd shaken his head. "I think all the so-called experts are wrong. We're in heaven now. We don't have to wait for later." And she'd smiled and splashed him with her foot. "If we don't have it now, how will we ever recognize it later?" He'd pushed her off the dock, and she'd climbed back up and pushed him in, and after they'd pushed each other off the dock a few times more they rode home.

The other was Nick, listening to Connor and Abby argue; Nick steadily mapping and analyzing the anomalies; Nick at the kitchen table in the house and in the living room and lying next to him upstairs, the night that Helen disappeared. Nick smiling at him, with that perfect confidence that, no matter what, they'd get through it together. He'd seen that smile for the first time the day he'd outlined how he'd set up that first dig site, and after five years it still made him happy to see it.

She would have liked knowing Nick better, he thought, and with that let himself drift away from consciousness.

* * *

It was on the train, going back, that Stephen saw the newspaper article.

"Look." He passed the paper to Nick, pointing at the seventh paragraph. "We've been nationalized."

Nick's face turned to granite as he read. "No. We already were semi-nationalized, more or less; the project's been militarized." He handed back the paper. "Fancy a side trip to the Home Office? I'll go see the conductor to change our tickets."

Stephen took the paper back and read it again:  


>   
> A spokesman for the Home Office said the bombers were captured so quickly due to the exemplary skill and efforts of Sir James Lester, former assistant to the Assistant Defense Minister, and currently acting deputy prime minister. In recognition of his work, he was knighted by Queen Zara yesterday in the equivalent of a military field promotion, according to a spokesman for Windsor Palace….
> 
> Because so many of the country's ministers had been killed, there were rumors that Sir Lester would become the next PM, but a spokesman for the government said this was unlikely because he had not declared for any political party, preferring to serve as an Independent. Sir Lester, who has overseen a variety of projects for the Home Office, had no comment for the press. However, a source at Downing Street said that he was being given personal charge of all projects concerning civil defense, in particular a number of undisclosed research projects involving universities….
> 
> The research projects are expected to be taken under stronger governmental control, because of Queen Zara's deep concern for the safety of her subjects…  
> 

  


* * *

"No, I don't have an appointment." Nick's patience was starting to run ragged. "I am Professor Nick Cutter of Central Metropolitan University, and this is Stephen Hart, and we need to see Sir James Lester immediately." Nick was letting his voice rise, in that way he had of alerting everyone of stormy weather. Stephen stood behind his right shoulder, ready to back him up. They had left their luggage in a locker at the tube station – the lockers were now inspected and patrolled by armed guards – and taken a taxi to Whitehall, then passed six security points on their way through the building itself.

"I am so sorry, professor, but –"

"Cutter! Good of you to come in. I've been trying to reach you." The newly created Sir James Lester walked out of his office, ignoring his secretary. She issued a minimalist shrug and turned back to her computer. "Mr. Hart. I am so very sorry about your sister. I assume you're just back from Scotland."

Lester's voice carried its usual professional tone but there was something in it – an acknowledgement of pain shared -- that made Stephen think he really did mean his condolences. He nodded. "Thank you."

Nick nodded in acknowledgement as well, but pressed on. "What's this about nationalizing the project?"

"Let's come over here into my office." Lester's office was huge, a suite that looked more like an apartment, high above the city rooftops visible through its tall windows. They went past his desk and over to a credenza covered with architect's plans. "I have something to show you, but I don't know what you've heard, so go ahead and tell me what is on your mind first."

Stephen watched Lester as Nick rattled off the list: he didn't want to lose the project, he wanted continued unrestricted access to project resources for all his people, and continued unrestricted access to all anomaly sites.

"Then I think you might be thanking me in a moment." Lester picked up a set of plans and opened them. "These are the plans for the new Anomaly Research Center, which is to be located not far from your university. You can certainly still teach, if you wish, but your main efforts are expected to comprise research into the anomalies – research on all levels – with commensurate staff increases and resources."

He turned the pages to show laboratories, offices, a research library, a central staging area, temporary housing for security staff, and more. Each of them could have their own office or laboratory if they wanted; there were floors and floors of space.

Stephen could only begin to imagine the amount of funding the government was willing to put into this. "Why?"

Lester glanced across at him, acknowledging the justice of the question. "Surely you can see where this is coming from. The murder of the royal family was a great shock to Her Majesty. She is deeply concerned about the security of the realm, and that includes increasing security in a variety of areas, not just those posed by political terrorists. When she was informed of this project, she insisted that this expansion be made, for the sake of science as well as security."

Nick had been going through the plans; now he turned his head to stare at Lester. "She knows about the anomalies." It wasn't a question.

Lester nodded. "She insisted that I tell her what was going on in the Forest of Dean; apparently she used to enjoy riding out here quite a bit and has friends in the area. One does not lie to the monarch, or evade the truth." He looked regretful for a moment. "Fortunately for us all, I was not clapped into Bedlam but was instead installed as administrator of the ARC project by her direct request. And she wishes to remain informed on our progress."

Nick's eyes went wide. Stephen drew a deep breath.

"Cutter, Her Majesty would like you to become head of the project and direct the research, with such duties for yourself as you choose." Lester waved a hand at the plans. "We have a fairly open budget for researchers – biologists, botanists, zoologists, physicists, specialists of any type you require – as well as for supplies and equipment." For a moment Lester looked as tired as Stephen was sure the man must actually feel, despite his spotless appearance. "Please, do your Queen and the country a favor and stay on, Cutter. I'd hate to be the one to have to tell her you weren't interested."

"You won't have to do that," Nick said. "I'm … frankly, I'm overwhelmed. Yes. Yes. I'm in."

"Welcome aboard, professor." Lester put out his hand and they shook on it, formally. He looked past Nick. "And yourself, Mr. Hart?"

Stephen didn't hesitate. "You can count on me, and I think I can speak for the two others on our staff as well." He shook Lester's hand.

"Splendid. I look forward to our working together. In the meantime," he consulted his watch, "I must run to a briefing with the Foreign Minister. Have Penelope get you passes so that you can just come in next time; I've already authorized them." He turned to show them out, and Nick went on ahead to speak to the administrative assistant.

"Sir James," Stephen said, and waited until Lester had turned back toward him, "You've lost people in this, too. I'm sorry."

Lester's face did not change -- Stephen suspected that Lester's brash façade was as much an assumed front as his own habitual reserve – but his voice was quieter. "Thank you, Stephen. You're one of few people who remember that fact. I appreciate it very much."

* * *

On the train home, Nick waited until they were out of the station before he took out his mobile. He put it next to the ear closest to Stephen and winked at him.

"Connor? Hello! How went the exams?"

"Still one more to go. How's Stephen?"

"I'm fine, thanks, Connor," Stephen said.

"Oh. Good. So, what's up, professor?"

"I've got a job for you, if you want it."

"I'm – oh, god, -- I'm – yes."

"You're not even asking what it is." Nick's eyes were crinkling.

"I don't care. If I'm working with you, I don't care."

"We can talk about the details later; I just wanted to make sure you were on board with us."

"Absolutely. You can count on me. Um. This is more of the project?"

"Yes. A lot more, long term."

"Oh, good! I've been looking at this bed-sitter –"

"Too much information, Temple. Talk to you when we get back."

"Right. Um. You're going to be calling Abby, too, aren't you?"

"This evening; I'd rather not call her at work."

"Brilliant. Bye!"

Nick closed his phone and leaned his head back. "Well, that's not what I expected today."

Stephen nodded. "Story of our lives."

"Yeah. But somehow it's something I never get used to." He leaned his head back against the seat. "We've gotten so experienced with bad news, how are we going to manage with something like this?"

* * *

With the academic year over and Nick on sabbatical to work only on the anomalies project, and with the construction and development of the Anomaly Research Centre, the next six months went by quickly. He welcomed the activity. When he was busy, working with Nick and Connor and especially when Abby was around, the empty space he felt inside hurt a little less. Lester had no problem with calling them up to the City to review plans on a day's notice, but he also paid for the train tickets, so nobody was complaining about interruptions.

Along with making suggestions for the physical building – an exercise room with locker rooms and showers, as well as the lockers for daily employee use, a small kitchenette on every floor and a corresponding lunchroom, larger individual laboratories, comfortable holding areas that could be adapted for a variety of kinds of creatures that might be temporarily marooned until their anomalies reopened – they were all involved in setting policy for dealing with anomalous creatures.

His father, after a long day at the bank, used to say that policy was like sausage; you didn't necessarily want to know about what went into it if you could swallow it and say it was tasty. Until now Stephen had had no idea how true that was.

"We need to know more about all these creatures so that we can formulate methods of dealing with them," Lester said. They were sitting around the table in the side room of his office, each of them with a pad and pen.

"I'd like it if we could try to send them home, as much as possible," Abby said. "I mean, I realize that's not always possible, but it would be best."

"Yes, it would," Lester agreed, "but what's best is not always what's feasible. Let us consider such things as logistics, backup, and transportation. It's one thing to deal with the smaller beasts, or herbivores, or even some of the more harmless large ones, but quite another thing if we are faced with allosaurs or icthyosaurs, or anything else with large teeth and a nasty disposition."

"We're a research facility," Nick said. "It's our responsibility as scientists to gather as much data as possible on as many creatures as possible. This means photography, measurements, all manner of calculations, and so on. I realize that some of them are best done when the creature is deceased, but I, too, would like to make sure that as many as possible of the creatures are sent back if at all possible. Consider: none of them have ever seen humans before, or a building. This is nothing like a natural habitat for them."

"Or for anyone," Stephen muttered. Lester raised an eyebrow. "Sorry."

"Ahem." Lester glanced around the table. "We haven't heard from you yet, Mr. Temple. Any thoughts?"

"Well, on the one hand you've got public safety, and on the other you've got science – sorry, Professor – and the government is paying the bills, which means it's interested in both." Connor tilted his head in thought. "If they're dangerous, public safety comes first? I mean, shoot first if there's danger, but if there's not, and if we have time, do all the studying possible before sending them back?"

"Now, that sounds like a plan," Nick said in his most professorial tones. "But you've been sketching something there."

"I don't know how to do it – yet – but I want to come up with a device that will tell us what's going to come through when an anomaly opens. Something that measures the time differential, so we have a heads' up on the creatures we might be dealing with and can get our ducks in a row, so to speak."

"How would you even begin to build such a thing?" Lester asked, curious.

"I don't know. I'm still thinking about that. I think it would start by taking readings of anomalies whenever they were open, and comparing them. They have electromagnetic fields, so I'm wondering if it's possible that different readings, different frequencies on some part of the electromagnetic spectrum that could be calibrated to tell us which time period to expect."

"Sounds good to me," Nick said.

Abby nodded. "It would help a lot."

"You're still with the zoo, Miss Maitland. When will you be able to come on board fully?" Lester asked.

"I'm hoping to be here by the end of the month. I've given notice, but they have to find another lizard person, and they've asked me to stay on as a consultant if necessary. If that's all right with you?"

"I see no problem with that." Lester rose. "I'll get the notes from this session to you and we can proceed in email for the next little while. Mr. Temple, if you will get me a list of what you require for your anomaly reader, I'll see that you have the supplies and equipment. Anything else?"

"Who's going to be hiring the rest of the staff?" Stephen asked.

"I am," Lester said, "but I'm open to suggestions from any of you. Surely you know more people in your respective fields than I do."

* * *

There was an official royal condolence letter for him, hand-delivered to the office. He let it lie on his desk for weeks before he opened it. The imprinted black letters swam before his eyes. One of his tears fell on the signature and he blotted it before he realized that he was picking up ink off the cardboard, from the handwritten "Zara".

He stared at it for a long time, and put it carefully back into the envelope in a drawer.

* * *

But it wasn't just his professional life that was picking up speed, while their new official home was being built.

Lester had agreed to arrange for comprehensive firearms licensing for all of them as authorized under the aegis of the Home Office, once they were trained and qualified, but so far only Stephen had received full licensing. Meanwhile, Nick was insisting on getting into better shape, as well as learning to shoot better, or at least to aim better. At Nick's request, Stephen was putting him through a sort of instant survival course, and once he got partway through he insisted that Connor and Abby take it, too.

"We never know what's going to come through one of those anomalies. No matter what it is, we have to be ready," Nick kept saying.

In time-honoured student fashion, Connor insisted on trying to test out of parts of it. Stephen left the decision on that up to Nick, and Nick agreed, on the basis that both Abby and Connor had other responsibilities at the moment.

Stephen broke what he was teaching into sections: one part marksmanship, one part basic survival, one part creative thinking. To make it fairer, he allowed Nick to take the tests as well; the more people who tested out, the sooner he could move on to more difficult matters.

To nobody's surprise, Abby tested out of basic marksmanship. She'd already spent nearly five years shooting tranquilizer darts at animals; she needed practice but she had the basics down cold. To everyone's surprise, Connor tested out of basic marksmanship as well. He was excitable and lacked a background with weaponry, but what he aimed at he hit. With Connor, it was either bull's-eyes or nothing. When he got past closing his eyes when he shot, his scores began to rival what Stephen's had been in high school, before he began training to qualify for the Olympics.

"Really quite remarkable," Nick said. "I hope I do as well. To what do you attribute this?"

"Video games," Connor said, grinning. He tried to do a John Wayne twirl but nearly dropped the pistol, which he handed back to Stephen with a sheepish grin.

Nick was better at handling guns in general than Connor was, and didn't flinch when he fired, but he was less likely to hit the center of the target, though he generally did hit the target. But he handed back the weapons to Stephen and said, "I'll back you up, but try not to make me the only backup you've got. If I'm all there is, make sure the Special Forces lads are on their way, too."

As a result of the survival course, as well as his continued work at the university, he was staying at Nick's house as much as ever. Most of the time he slept in the spare room, but not always; if either of them had too much to drink, they both ended up in Nick's bed.

One morning after breakfast, Nick looked him in the eye. "Who are you dating lately? I haven't seen you out and about much."

"When do you get out and about?"

"The question stands, Stephen."

He shrugged. "I've been busy."

"You know this can't last." Nick's voice was gentle. "It shouldn't, for both our sakes."

"I didn't think my cooking was that bad."

"We have to work together; we've got important work to do. Much as I care about you, my friend, we need a little space between us in our lives." Nick leaned forward in his chair, focusing on Stephen. "I'm a man for women, and I think you are, too, at least most of the time. Besides, there's still Helen. She could come back through the anomaly any day. Would you want her to find us in bed together?"

For one grand unthinking moment his eyes met Nick's and he could tell that they were both seeing it, all of the glorious possibilities.

Nick shook his head, though a smile played around his mouth. "All right, I take that part back, but the matter stands. I can't really give myself over to more than one person at a time, and right now that's still Helen. Will be for a while." He glanced down at the table and back up at Stephen. "Even if she never comes back, I don't know. And it's not fair to you." He swallowed hard. "Look elsewhere, my dear friend. Your lady love is always welcome to stay with you in the guest room."

It was by far the gentlest rejection Stephen had ever heard, and possibly the most generous, but it still hurt.

"I'm not willing to lose you, too." He swallowed hard. "I'm sorry." He got up, put his dishes into the sink, and leaned down to kiss Nick on the cheek, but Nick turned and their lips met for a moment that neither of them shied away from, or prolonged. "It's time I went back to writing the dissertation, anyway." He picked up his pack and left by the front door, letting it close behind himself, and walked down to the village, where he had a double scotch at the Pig-In-A-Poke before burying himself behind a small mountain of journals, books and papers at a study table in the remote depths of the library's foreign languages collection for the rest of the weekend.

After that, he didn't sleep at the house for a year, not until long after he began dating Alison, which apparently made Nick feel better, since he knew Alison wasn't Nick's type and vice versa. It wasn't something Stephen really felt he understood. He had never made a move toward Nick, not a pass, not a kiss except at that last moment. He had done nothing except lie next to Nick in a bed when both of them were too upset to do anything but be there for each other. But it had made Nick feel uncomfortable, so that was an end to it, no matter how he felt about it himself.

* * *

Ultimately, it all still came back down to Helen. Dead or alive, she still had a hand in his life as much as in Nick's. Nick wouldn't go beyond looking at another woman while there was still a chance of her coming back. And he himself looked down every street and around every corner, still unconsciously searching for that dark hair, that athletic stride, that elegant strength that had always marked Helen for him as different from all other women. He found himself, some nights, waking up from dreams of making love with her – always love, not just sex -- to dream of kissing the three moles on her left breast that only showed when she was naked, and running his fingers over the narrow line along her back that was the only evidence of her skidding down a rocky slope years earlier.

Running wasn't doing it for burning off his energy, helping him focus. He couldn't let his dreams of Helen past overwhelm his life. He had to do something more.

The next week he went down to the new shooting range below the ARC, first thing in the morning. It had been set up for the benefit of the Special Forces soldiers stationed at the Center, but it was available to all authorized ARC employees. The sergeant behind the desk raised an eyebrow until he showed his ID, then gave him the run of the place. He spent most of a day shooting at targets with every weapon the ARC could provide him, until all it took for him to move into a focused mental space was picking up a rifle or a pistol and drawing a bead on the target. He shot until his arms ached, until the recoil dug bruises into the front of his shoulder, until even with aching arms and bruises he could still hit exactly what he aimed at.

After that, it was either an hour a day, or two hours three times a week. Within the month, he took off his ear protectors to find Abby scowling at a target in the next booth, her hands wrapped around an automatic pistol. As he left he asked the sergeant to fit her out with a rifle she could handle, and later in the day she thanked him.

* * *

He had met Alison at the library the weekend he walked away from Nick, though he didn't realize it at the time. She was working at the front desk when he left in the evening, and looked up from her computer long enough for their eyes to meet, and for his to skid away. Much later, she told him that he had seemed so upset that she had almost come after him to ask if there was anything that could be done, except that she had sensed that he wouldn't have accepted the help.

"I didn't realize your sister had died so soon before that," she said. "Death's a hard thing to deal with, every time."

He had nodded, and said, "Yes, it is," and left it at that. He never told her that the weekend hadn't been about Veronica at all.

There were a lot of things that he didn't tell Alison, but that seemed to be all right with her. She accepted what little he did tell her, about the project, about the things he was interested in, and let anything else go. She had her own interests and friends, some of whom were his friends but not all. Their mutual friends were other postgraduate students, instructors and professors, from their varied departments.

Alison had wavy black hair and grey eyes, and was only a little taller than Abby. Her family owned a small chain of grocery stores in Wales. Since she had no head for business, and her younger brother did, she was at university to find something else she wanted to do, and in the course of things she'd settled upon botanical chemistry. She wasn't one of the botanists who were so delighted by growing the rare ferns and, by now, other out-of-place plants that seemed to turn up in the Forest of Dean and nowhere else; she was the one who took bits of the plants into a laboratory and figured out what their chemical properties were and how they might be useful. Since both of them left their work at work when they were together, the topic seldom arose, but he knew enough about it to make reasonable comments when they were at a pub.

She was a runner, too, which meant that even when they weren't staying together he might find her out on a road, or on the trail through the hills behind the University that made his quads ache. He envied her ability to run along that path longer than he could, but it didn't hurt that he enjoyed the view when she outran him.

It wasn't just convenience, though that was undoubtedly part of what brought them together. It wasn't a great romance. It wasn't just friendship. He didn't have a name for the way the relationship was working, except to be glad it was there.

They were together for almost three years, from just after the time when he'd started working at the ARC, through when he finished writing his dissertation -- interspersed with tracking creatures, tranquilizing them, shooing them back through anomalies and the rest of the circus that his work life had become -- survived his defense and was awarded his doctorate. He was pleased to see the "Dr. Stephen Hart" nameplate on the door of his work area at the ARC, though he seldom if ever used the title. He was even more pleased to find a sizeable increase in his paycheck because of it. He'd begun to consider ways of spending some of that money to celebrate when Alison came home to his apartment one day, tremendously excited at getting on a research team that was going to go to four countries in the next two years, to conduct onsite analysis of small-population local flora and consider the practical and ecological factors involved in their cultivation and use.

He had to be delighted for her – she'd been working so hard toward this for months – and he used some of that money to take her out in celebration. But then she was gone, and he was alone again, looking at Nick being alone.

And then Helen returned.

* * *

Nick hadn't gotten to the ARC yet, but he'd had a plumbing problem at the house the day before so nobody was expecting him to show before noon. Connor had gotten into the habit of coming in early some days to catch Stephen when he emerged from the shooting gallery to help him think through the practical aspects of various kinds of technical issues. They were talking in the kitchenette and Stephen was getting a cup of coffee when his mobile rang.

Nick's voice sounded so excited that he'd slipped into broad Scots. "Stephen! Get over here. Our Helen's back!"

"What?" The cup slipped out of his hand, which suddenly had no nerves in it. It smashed on the floor at his feet, drenching his jeans with hot coffee. He ignored it. "Where?"

Connor, who had followed him to the kitchenette, grabbed for the minivac to clean up the ceramic shards and a sponge for the coffee. Stephen hadn't moved.

"The Forester's station. She must've come through last night and they found her there this morning, asleep by the entryway." Nick drew an audible breath. "She's very thin, but she's pretty well. You come, but don't bring the others. The anomaly's closed already, you can call back to Connor to do castings and readings and such."

"I'll be right there." He stepped over Connor and was on his way to his locker before Connor could stand again.

"Anomaly?" Connor asked, ever vigilant.

"Helen Cutter." Stephen threw his jacket on and nearly slammed his locker in haste. "She's come back."

He was through the swinging doors before Connor could close his mouth.

* * *

Helen was certainly back, but not unchanged. She had once been fit and healthy; now she was whipcord thin, scorched brown by the sun, and if the rest of her body were as scarred as her forearms -- no, he didn't want to think about that. She had a little more body fat than someone who had been in a concentration camp, but barely enough to avoid looking skeletal.

"But you're all right," Nick kept asking. He had an arm around her, and she leaned her head against his shoulder. Her hair, which had been so long and glossy, had been hacked off irregularly a while ago and had grown out at all different lengths in a way that would have looked charming on Abby but made Helen look tired. She wore a workman's coverall; her own clothes – the same ones she'd worn when she disappeared, as he recalled – were folded on the table, threadbare, sun-bleached, stained, torn, shredded at the edges.

"They let me have a shower here; god, it was wonderful," she said. "There are remarkably few useful warm springs in the past, you have no idea. They're either too hot or inaccessible. Or extremely sulfurous."

"You look good," he told her.

"What, in this old thing?" she retorted, but with an echo of the sharp, sweet smile she used to wear. Nick laughed out loud.

She looked so changed, as if the Helen he knew had been distilled into Essence of Helen Cutter and poured back into this woman. He found himself looking at her hands, her face, her gestures, looking for differences while hoping for familiarities.

He smiled at her and told the back of his head to shut up for a while. At least Helen was back. Anything else could wait until later.

* * *

That night he lay awake in bed watching the flashes of light from cars on the road slide in through the blinds, skid across the ceiling in his flat and vanish as the cars turned the corner. He couldn't get past seeing Helen again, and seeing how she had changed.

She had scars from defensive fighting all along both forearms, though more on the left. She had marks near her collarbone that looked as if they might have come from some creature's teeth. She walked with a bit of a limp, though she explained that away as a pulled muscle.

Not all the changes were physical. She startled fairly easily, at any unexpected sound, particularly things like motors turning on and off in appliances. If she were asked something she wasn't expecting, she hesitated before replying, as if she had to search for the words.

That's reasonable, he told himself. She's had nobody to talk with for years. When would she have been thinking in words?

Nick had taken her to the doctor for a complete physical that same day, although she hadn't wanted to go yet. According to what Nick said when he called later on, she was in excellent condition considering what she'd gone through; she was now caught up on inoculations, and had been prescribed an antibiotic for a mild persistent infection as well as a vitamin supplement.

But the back of his mind kept going back to that first moment, when he'd walked into the forester's office and she had seen him – and had given no indication that she knew who he was, or what they had been, or that they and ever been anything to each other, not even student and teacher. Her eyes had widened in confusion and then skidded away, as if she hadn't expected to see him at all.

The rational side of his mind kept telling him to pay attention to how long she had been gone and what she had gone through. Think about prisoners of war, for instance. People who've been separated from family and friends for years don't react the same way when they see them again as they did before. She'd been living outdoors for nearly four years; just being inside walls had to feel confining.

What Helen had been through was as rough as what many prisoners of war endured, he thought, though it was one thing to be imprisoned and beaten, and another to be in constant danger of being eaten by large predators.

As he rolled over and fell asleep, he realized that he would have been willing to disregard anything strange or different about her, anything at all, if she'd only looked at him directly once. Helen's direct gaze and take-no-prisoners confidence was one of the things that had attracted him to her from the first. She still had the confidence, but seeing her without that gaze coming back at him was like watching a ghost.

At least she's home now, he told himself. At least Nick has her back.

* * *

Stephen heard from Alison regularly online, as well as by post; she was having a wonderful time in Botswana examining indigenous plants – which was about as much as she said about work. She told him about living at the edge of the Kalahari Desert, learning what pattern to use for setting up camp so that it would be easiest to see lions and other unpredictable wildlife when they showed up, and the problems of sandstorms interfering with data collecting. Some weekends she'd traveled to the eastern part of the country, where she was climbing inselbergs in place of hills. Long-distance running alone, as she loved to do in England, was out of the question; it attracted too much attention from wildlife and raised political issues.

He wrote back about the running he'd been doing on the hills near the new ARC facility, following the old right-of-ways that went back to the Romans and before, and what ruins were located near the trail. He mentioned picking up the latest Tom Clancy novel on a whim, discarding it as complete shite and concluding that if Clancy had been a British author instead of an American one he'd never have sold a score of copies, and would have done better to stick to selling insurance, because he hadn't a clue. He told her the silly joke Connor had made last week, and Nick's response to it. He shied away from talking about anything that actually meant anything; it was hard enough to do that in person, and now there was so much more he didn't want to talk about.

* * *

While Helen was recovering and catching up on her sleep, Nick came back to the ARC and told them that she'd said she wanted to be involved in the research. "She needs a bit of time to recover somewhat, but she said she'd like very much to help us."

"I think her contribution could be incalculably valuable," Lester said. "By all means get her on staff as soon as she's available. What was her specialization, when she was teaching?"

"Her thesis was on adaptive evolution – how creatures adapt to their environment over time and how they change. She was also interested in biogeography – locating the populations of various species, trying to track migratory patterns for various kinds of prehistoric animals, things like that."

"I imagine that her recent experiences have given her new insights into all of the above, and I look forward to hearing them," Lester said. "Oh, by the way, the Queen will be coming here next week on a brief unofficial visit.

"The Queen?" Connor's jaw dropped. "The real Queen?"

"No, the counterfeit that's stored in the Tower. Of course, the real queen, Connor." Lester let his amusement show. "Yes, Her Majesty is deeply interested in this facility and its projects. She is familiar with our work, though not at any level of scientific detail so do answer her questions in ordinary English, please. We can expect her to stop by next Tuesday; do you think Helen will be well enough to come in by then?"

Nick blinked. "I'm pretty sure she will. I'll ask her."

"Splendid. Now if you'll excuse me, Botany wants me to look at some sort of club moss they've discovered near the Forest that they say is unlike any other club moss they've ever seen. Perhaps it carries a shillelagh."

* * *

He stopped by the house a day later to pick up a book he was borrowing from Nick, and also to see how Helen was doing. He knocked, and when there was no answer he let himself in and went to Nick's bookshelves to look for it. When he turned around Helen was in the doorway wrapped in Nick's old bathrobe, with a carving knife in her right hand, her left arm up in defense posture, crouched to kick, charge or run.

"I did knock," he said, holding very still.

"Sorry." She breathed slowly and relaxed from the defensive posture she'd assumed. "I'll just put this back in the kitchen." And she left.

"So, you're coming to the ARC?" he called after her. Best to just ignore her reaction, he thought.

"Yes." She was back in the doorway, her eyes apologetic. "I think I've remembered how to make tea, if you've got time for a cup."

He came and sat in the sunlit kitchen while she busied herself with the electric kettle and the teapot. "How are you doing?" he asked.

She turned and stood next to the counter, one hand on it as if to be sure of its reality. "It's strange. The things I thought would be hard to do, once I got back, aren't what I expected."

"Such as?"

"This. I have to think of how things work before I use them. I could make you a meal over a fire very easily, but anything that requires more recent technology takes effort."

He could see that. He nodded. "But you're feeling better?"

"I'm certainly getting caught up on sleep." She gave him a crooked smile, and for a moment looked like the Helen he'd known. "Antibiotics are a wonderful invention; I must have had that little low-lying infection for months. I notice you're not asking me where I was and what I did."

"When you want to tell us, you will."

Her face softened. "You've always been a kind friend, Stephen. I'm glad that hasn't changed."

"We were more than that to each other, once. Do you remember it?"

Something crossed her face that he didn't recognize. "A … little," she said slowly. "I had to not let myself care about anyone but myself for so long. It's …"

"It's all right." He could see the stress in the lines on her face. "Water's ready."

"So it is." She filled the pot and brought it over to the table while he got down cups for them. "Tell me," she said as she sat down across from him. "What's this about the Queen coming to visit? Surely she must be near 80 now or more?"

"Oh, right," he said. "You wouldn't know." And he told her in a few words about the explosion at Buckingham Palace that had pushed the late Princess Royal's equestrienne daughter onto the throne. "She used to ride in the Forest of Dean, she knows about anomalies and the ARC's work. The ARC operates by royal patronage, actually."

Helen blinked. "That's … different." Her eyes widened as she took it in. "I'm very sorry about your sister."

He nodded his head once in acknowledgement; he still didn't like to talk about it.

She took the hint and poured for them. She added milk and sugar to hers, something she wouldn't have done before, and drank with an expression of intense pleasure. "I missed creamy-tasting things so much, foods I never really was that interested in. I'd forgotten just how much enjoyment there is in eating for pleasure as opposed to just having something to eat."

He nodded. He felt as if he was drinking in the joy of seeing her alive, watching her lean back in her chair and stir her tea, pick it up and close her eyes to sip and smile. Someone had trimmed her hair properly, and she looked more rested, but she was still underweight, more tendon than muscle and little else. He wondered if she might want someone to take her shopping for clothes; her driver's license wouldn't still be valid. He wouldn't mind doing it; he was pretty sure he could get Nick to justify the time off, and he knew Nick wouldn't care about the cost.

"Would you tell me more about the research at the ARC?" she asked.

* * *

He shouldn't have been surprised at how well the Queen's visit went; this was the kind of thing at which Lester and his people excelled. He wasn't sure if it was Lester or Abby who persuaded Connor to wear something approaching ordinary street clothing instead of club wear, but Abby showed up in a dress – the first time he'd seen her in what she dismissively called 'the girl thing' – and looked cute. He knew better than to use the 'c' word around her; she had a powerful kick when they were working out in the ARC gym, and he didn't want her using it on him.

Her visit was supposed to start with a brief address to the whole ARC staff in the building's circular inner courtyard. Queen Zara went to the podium and looked over the group and around at the building itself, looked down at the cards in her hands and put them into a pocket. "You all know the history of this building and this project. I don't think I have the words to tell you how much it means to me that something good come out of … so much devastation."

Her voice gained certainty and resonance. "You are brilliant people, and you're doing irreplaceable scientific work, and you're working to protect the people of this country." She paused, and he saw her eyes glisten. "I want you all to know that you have now and will always have my personal gratitude. It's hard to venture into unknown territory; I've learned that lesson well in the last few years. It means so very much to me that this is something you do all the time. I hope we can learn a great deal from one another in our explorations as we move into the future." She carefully wiped a tear from one eye. "Thank you for your work. Thank you for … everything."

Stephen found himself on his feet, clapping; some were cheering as well, even the most proper and reserved lab techs, and Lester was smiling and solicitous of the Queen, handing her his own linen handkerchief and a cup of water. Even Helen was on her feet, smiling and clapping, in a new blue dress that she'd bought when they went shopping together.

There was a receiving line, and Queen Zara had a few words for each of them. She asked Connor to show her his latest invention, and he blushed and nodded. When she paused in front of Stephen, she said, "I'm very glad you're still with this project, though I missed your presence on the Olympic team. I'd rather have Britain's crack shot where he's the most useful."

Stephen suddenly felt as if he were Connor. "You're very kind, ma'am."

She took his hand. "I also wanted to express my personal condolences about your sister. I met her a year earlier, and I'd looked forward to knowing her better once she and Reggie were married."

"Thank you." He bowed, heartstruck, and she squeezed his hand and went on to speak to Nick.

He missed the first few words, until he heard Nick say, "And this is my wife, Helen, who has just returned to us after going missing through an anomaly for four years."

"Ma'am." Helen gave her a perfect curtsy.

Queen Zara raised her. "I am so pleased that you're back, and I hope to see you when your schedule permits. We have a lot to catch up on."

It wasn't improper etiquette to look at whomever the Queen was talking with, so he turned his head and caught the instant of utter panic on Helen's face before it was covered by politeness. "I'd enjoy that, Your Majesty, when I'm feeling a little better."

"Of course," the Queen said. "You've been through a long ordeal, and I don't wish to impose at all. When you're ready, please do call the palace and come for a visit."

"Thank you very much," Helen bowed again and Queen Zara smiled at her kindly and moved on to talk with the technical staff.

"What is it, my dear?" Nick said, his arm around her.

"I – my mind blanked. I didn't remember ever meeting her before." She frowned. "Do you know if I did?"

"Your sister Carlotta used to be her travel agent, I think. And I believe you ran into her at some equestrian event or other that Carlotta took you to a few years ago. But no, I don't think you were close, if that's the question.

"Ah." Helen breathed a little easier. "You know, I hit my head more than once while I was away. I've probably lost more than one piece of memory." Her mouth twisted. "Considering some of those falls, it's amazing that I remember anything at all."

"I'm sure she'll understand," Nick said.

* * *

He didn't expect Helen to fit seamlessly into the ARC; she seemed to wince at spending much time at all within its steel-and-glass enclosure. But he could see her trying to fit, although she managed to get out of most of the meetings, and he could see Lester doing his best to work around that.

But the biggest problem appeared to come from Nick himself, who apparently would have liked nothing better than to have her sit down with a tape recorder and dictate an account of everything she'd done and everywhere she'd been while she was away, so they could correlate it and study it and track it. She flatly refused to do that at all.

Stephen could hear them from two offices over; he'd stayed late to cross-check some of Connor's calculations for him.

"Why?" Nick asked. "What possible reason – "

"First, because some of it was damned unpleasant. Second, because I don't remember all of it." Helen's voice, which had started out quiet, was gaining volume. "Third, because I don't want to remember all of it. And fourth, because it's my choice, and I choose not to."

It was almost like being back at the University on a Friday night.

"Look, Nick," she went on, "there's just too much for me to tell it like that. You try remembering every single thing you did in the last four or five years. Go on, try it. How far would you get?"

"You have a point," he said slowly. "All right. You know Lester wants to use your expertise. How do you want to do it?"

"Give me an era to work with – any era – and if it's somewhere that I've been, I'll tell you all that I can remember about it, as much as I can. But don't ask me to do it in order. And don't expect me to spend all my time here inside this … cage." The note of pleading in her voice made him raise his head to listen instead of trying to avoid hearing. "I've spent all these years outdoors, mostly, with some time living in caves and so on. You really can't expect me to just stay in now."

"I think you'd be invaluable out in the field." Nick sounded as if he were placating her, which Stephen didn't think would work. "But we need to know more of what you know so that we'll be more valuable out there, too."

Glass walls were useful. He could see Nick handing her the small recorder, and her reluctance to accept it, but she finally put it in her pocket.

"Give me somewhere to start from," she said.

Nick moved closer to her. His voice was so quiet that Stephen could barely catch it. "I could ask you to catalogue where you got some of your scars. Your badges of courage, I'd call them. Like this one." He kissed her behind her ear and moved down along her neck. "And this one."

Stephen pulled his head back down below the level of the room divider. He hadn't meant to intrude – theoretically, he wasn't supposed to be there, and only Nick and Helen were in the building on any floor above the SF barracks in the basement.

But he'd known Helen Farquhar Cutter very well in the past. Back then, if he'd kissed her on that particular spot on her neck and nuzzled behind her ear, just as Nick was doing, she'd have all but torn off his clothes and had him there on the floor, and more than once he'd been glad of the thick carpet in his flat for just that reason.

Now, though, he caught a distinct look of impatience or distaste on her face as Nick kissed her neck.

It hit him in the stomach. Nick deserved better.

Or else something was very wrong.

He deliberately put himself into his work, ignoring everything else, until he was sure they were out of the building, and then left. Their marriage wasn't his business, and she'd seemed unclear about her own relationship with him. For once in his life, he was going to stay clear of the whole thing, as much as possible.

* * *

One morning a few days later, when he came up from the shooting gallery after testing the revised laser-linked scope on a rifle – the gunnery sergeant knew it was not sighting perfectly, but wanted someone else to work with it while he took measurements and made adjustments – he found Abby putting her coat in the locker while Rex sat on her shoulder and chirped. She had adapted a cat harness for him, and held onto the end of the leash.

"Well, you're looking perky," he said to Rex, who chirped amiably at him and accepted a bit of apple that Abby handed him.

"I wanted to ask George, up on Three, if he could get any idea of how old Rex is. He seems to be growing a bit, and it would be nice to know how large he might become."  
Abby smiled as Rex nuzzled her ear. "Yes, you. If you're going to grow up to be two meters long, you'll have to find somewhere else to sit besides my shoulder. Your bones aren't that hollow."

"What about Lester?"

"Oh, he suggested it. I think he's so glad that he doesn't have a flying lizard in the office all the time that he was willing to help me keep him at home. It's not like it's a security breach – everyone here's been sworn or signed papers. Last thing George was working on was that grumpy baby _Dimetrodon grandis_ with the sore foot; I think he'll appreciate dealing with a smaller lizard that doesn't have to be sedated to be treated."

The doors swung open to let Nick and Helen come through. "Well, hello, Rex," Nick said. "Good thing you've got the leash on him."

"Lester wouldn't let me bring him in otherwise." Abby smirked a little.

"Ah. Drycleaning bills." Nick hung his own jacket in the locker.

Helen came over to look at Rex. "Aren't you a beauty?" She put out her hand toward him.

Rex sniffed her curiously, then backed up so he was more behind Abby's head than on her shoulder. He bobbed his head at her and hissed.

"Rex!" Abby said. "Have some manners. I'm so sorry, Helen, he's been a bit out of sorts. Did you change your soap or shampoo? He gets so used to scents that little changes like that rattle him a bit."

"That must be it," Helen said lightly. "Sorry, Rex, you've done yourself out of getting your neck scratched." She went on through the next doors with Nick.

Rex didn't come out from behind Abby's head until she was gone.

"That's … different." Abby's gaze sought his own. "Isn't it?"

"Might be the shampoo."

"I made that up," she said quietly, and he turned to stare at her. She lowered her voice. "Rex has been around since before the ARC opened, and he knows people pretty well. He doesn't get that rocked by stuff like shampoo any more. But …" her voice trailed off. "I wouldn't say Rex is a perfect judge of character, but he's pretty good most of the time, you know."

He nodded, but with a sideward glance at the others in the room. "Want some company on the way to see George? I need to go up to check a map."

* * *

Gradually, Helen began to come through with details about the Permian Era, the Jurassic, and the leading edge of the Neolithic, where she'd apparently lived for an entire summer. She was willing to talk with the various departments who asked for her as a consultant, and habitually prefaced her words with, "What I saw was …" or "When I was there …" and cautioned those she spoke with to regard her experience as only one data point, not necessarily the definitive one for any time or place.

Lester was pleased, though an expression of private horror passed across his face at times when he was listening to some of what she'd endured. About a month after Helen began working at the ARC, Lester stopped by the lab where Stephen was working at a computer, correlating Connor's data on the last three anomalies, while Helen was talking with the Ecological Studies staff two floors above, closed the door and came over to stand behind him and look at the monitor.

"I'm not really here, Stephen, so let's keep this confidential."

Stephen nodded, glancing up at Lester. He pointed to something on the monitor, thinking of glass walls and lines of sight.

"Good man," Lester said. "You used to know Helen fairly well, I believe, before she disappeared. How much different is she now?"

"How do you mean?"

Lester drew a chair up next to Stephen as if to examine the data more closely. "I met her several times when she was at university, but never in a professional mode. Was she honest?"

His eyes widened for a moment. "Yes. She was forthright, she didn't have an agenda, and she said what she thought regardless of the result. Some of that hasn't changed."

"But some of it has, I agree. I've caught her lying."

"About what?"

Lester's mouth twisted a little, as if he were trying to compute something that didn't add up. "Inconsequential things. Where she bought clothes, for instance. There's no such shop as Newbury's on High Street, either here or in London or Edinburgh, not even in Glasgow, Perth, Bath or Manchester. I assure you, if there were, my wife would have shopped there." He shrugged. "But she's also been mistaken about historical matters, things like the living conditions here during and after what she called the Second World War. Food rationing, for example."

"That would presume a First World War." Stephen thought a moment. "Is that what she's calling the Pre-Weimar Conflict?"

"Apparently. And she made some offhand comment about an Austrian or German leader named Hitler whom I've never heard of. I looked him up; there was a very minor landscape artist by that name some eighty years ago, but he died of influenza after his first exhibit."

"That's really odd." He let his shoulders relax a little. "Then it's not just me, noticing things."

"No, it's not. She's also extremely unwilling to talk about what she was doing some of the time when she was away. It makes me think that she had some, err … traumatic encounter out there that she doesn't want to talk about." Lester caught his glance. "Possibly with a Neanderthal, or Homo erectus, or something …"

He reached over to pick up a book as if to consult it; his hand shook. "I hadn't thought of that."

"Neither had I, but apparently Abby did. She said she'd had a flatmate who'd gotten into a bad situation during her undergraduate years and who had much the same sort of responses to people later on."

He glanced at Lester's face, which held sympathy, not sarcasm. "What else?"

"She seemed to think that she'd been gone eight years, not four and a bit. I suppose," Lester paused as if to consider some bit of data onscreen, "traveling for so long could make it difficult to keep track of time. What did you notice?"

"A lot of things that I was putting down to memory loss from hitting her head," he said. "She didn't know Queen Zara, though she and her sister Carlotta had dinner with Zara Philips a couple of times; Carlotta told me all about it while we were at dinner the day Helen and Nick were married. She didn't seem to know me, either, for quite a while. Other small things, like thinking someone had built a tunnel under the Channel to France."

"Perhaps she read a lot of science fiction. I was sure that Helen used to take the ferry to the Continent on her holidays during university."

"Not when I knew her – the books or the ferry. She went rock-scrambling in Wales or in the Grampians."

Lester waved away the rock-scrambling and the hypothetical trips to France. "Anyhow, considering what Abby said, I am thinking of asking Helen to see a counselor. We have one on staff, and there is also a trauma counselor attached to the palace whom I could call; she's not part of the ARC but she understands confidentiality and worked with the Queen and others who lost people during the bombing."

"You think you're going to get Helen into counseling?" He couldn't help raising his eyebrows; they fairly soared at the thought. "It won't be easy. She's barely willing to endure being indoors at this point."

"That's true. Well, what can I do as a conscientious employer? I'll make the offer, make sure both she and Cutter know it's confidential and available, and leave it at that." Lester stood, rocking on his heels slightly. "Stephen, I rely upon your good sense in this; you've known both of them longer than anyone else besides Cutter. If there's anything you ever feel I should know, I'll hold it confidential."

He nodded once, flicking his eyes to the side. "Nick's coming."

"—I see. Very interesting, Mr. Hart. Do make sure to let me know your progress." Lester was at the door leaving as Nick entered. "Cutter."

"What was Lester on about?" Nick asked.

He shrugged. "Wanted to see if I'd found any useful patterns in the data yet. What's up?"

"We need to find a way to figure out when and where the anomalies will crop up before they do. The descriptions that Helen is giving about the locations where they open up in other eras don't correlate well with what's been happening here." Nick half-sat on the desk. "They're not always in clearings, but in water or in air or off the edges of things. We've been terribly lucky up to now that they seem to be restricting themselves to the Forest of Dean, and not scattering across the whole of the country, let alone elsewhere."

"That's something I've been wondering about, too," Stephen said. He picked up a pencil, something to hold between his fingers and play with. "Are they happening in other countries? Why only here?"

"I don't know. I've been thinking of asking Lester to check on that for us, since he's the one with the international connections." Nick nodded. "And then there's the question of which anomalies open where, and why. Maybe there's something that attracts a specific anomaly to a specific place. Connor has been at work on that, but he needs more data."

"He's working on some new devices; I'm pulling together some assumptions for him to program into one of them."

Nick nodded. "Good." He seemed to be in a good enough mood, so Stephen took the chance.

"How's Helen doing?"

"She has her good days, and her bad days."

"If she's up to it, I wouldn't mind going out into the Forest with her on a bit of walkabout," Stephen said carefully. "We need to make the rounds, check for fresh tracks. It's a choice of either having her along or Abby, since Connor's so deeply involved in his project."

"Wouldn't hurt to have Abby do more field work; I think she'd rather be out there, too. We don't have enough creatures in-house to keep her interest at the moment."

The last couple of lost creatures had been a pair of giant camels the size of giraffes, who showed up in a field and looked as confused as might be possible for camels. They had been at a loss for how to herd or move the stubborn creatures until Abby had borrowed a tame, trained camel that had been given to the zoo by a circus that had gone bankrupt and had ridden it out in the hope that the lost pair would follow it. After a few startled snorts and some prolonged sniffing and head swings that had nearly knocked Abby out of her saddle, the lost camels had accepted the smaller one as a friend and had followed it to the ARC. That particular anomaly had flickered for two days, coming back on full strength briefly the previous afternoon, when the team, the borrowed camel and a few spare ARC staff had managed to herd the camels back into their anomaly again, to everyone's relief. Abby had returned the camel to the zoo with the government's official thanks; its keeper noticed that it had seemed happier with the exercise and asked her to consider riding it occasionally.

She was in the ARC kitchenette when Nick and Stephen went there a few minutes later, waiting for the microwave to finish.

"Want some lunch?" she asked. "It's curry; I brought extra."

"No, thanks," Nick said. "How would you like to go out to the Forest with Stephen tomorrow?"

"Sounds good. Bring the instant plaster, I suppose?"

Stephen nodded. "I want to check a few of the places we don't generally go to," he said.

Abby nodded. "If there's anything special you want me to bring, let me know before the end of the day."

"You might want to start from here, first thing in the morning," Nick suggested. "And by first thing I mean dawn. Take some time off now, rest of the afternoon. It's likely to be a long day."

Before Abby could speak, Nick turned and said, "Oh, Connor, I have some ideas for you," and went off down the hallway.

"That was interesting," Abby said. "What's up?"

"I'm not sure," he told her. He got a cup of coffee from the fairly fresh pot and sat down with her. "Save your questions for tomorrow; I'll see if I can find out anything."

"Okay. But I might have a lot of questions." She gazed at him thoughtfully into the curry. "What are you looking for out there?"

He sat down again. "What do you know about ley lines and standing stones?" It was the first thing he could think of; he couldn't talk to her about Helen in the middle of the ARC where anyone could come in. And it was something he'd been toying with, looking at the data and the patterns that the known anomalies and the hypothesized ones made on a map, and overlaying onto the pattern some of the more widely accepted ley lines or paths.

"They're ancient walking paths marked with stones, but aren't they also supposed to be lines of magnetism within the earth?" Her eyes lit up. "And we know that the anomalies have their own magnetic fields. Stephen, that's brilliant." She licked her fork clean and sketched lines on the table. "We have the map of known anomaly sites, and the survey of probably sites, but we haven't tried to track them with the earth's magnetic fields before."

He nodded. "The problem is, there are a lot of different maps of ley lines and no single authoritative one. Some people tracking them are total New Age looneys, and some are doing it from a geological or earth-science perspective. Others are doing it based on the age of the markers, but they don't even use the same markers sometimes, or the same lines. But there are a number of markers within the Forest itself that some lines could go through. Maybe if we go to the markers and take Connor's device that measures magnetic fluctuations we could see whether that has any relationship at all to where the anomalies are. And then we could walk the lines, as closely as we could, and see what shows up. We might be missing things." He frowned a little. "I don't know. Ley lines are more folklore than anything else; I could be completely wrong about this."

"But it's a line of inquiry that we haven't followed before, and it has an old tradition. That's good," she said. "Traditionally, the fairy folk who come and go have homes or gateways of some sort along ley lines, don't they? You know, the kind of thing where someone disappears and shows back up a couple hundred years later."

"Yeah." They smiled at each other for a moment, and said together, "We're going to go look for fairies."

"I do hope that's a joke," Lester said, pausing as he passed by in the hall. "You don't really expect the Tuatha de Danaan to come through an anomaly, do you?"

"Well, the Tuatha are Irish, not English; if they show up here they'll be fairly lost, too," Abby said. "This is more about tracking lines that people have noticed that have different magnetic strength than the surrounding land, and seeing if there's any correlation to the location of anomalies.

"Ah. That makes so much more sense." Lester adjusted his tie. "Pity that Connor won't be here; he called in with a horrible head cold from that flat he's sharing. I told him to keep his cold away from the rest of us and come in when it's better." Lester went over to sniff the coffee pot. "How is it that your coffee smells so much better than mine does, even though mine costs so much more?"

"Maybe because we wash the coffeemaker out with baking soda down here?" Abby said. Rex trilled and wagged his tail.

"No, that's not it. Good morning, Rex." Lester poured himself a cup from the common pot and went his way, keeping the shoulders of his exquisitely cut suit well away from the lizard.

* * *

He and Abby parked her car and made their way through a reforested area to the cleared area where the Long Stone stood. "This is supposed to be the meeting point of all the ley lines in this area," he said.

"How many lines are there? Two? Five? A hundred?" Abby asked.

"Don't know. I couldn't find a map, or even a complete list. If you look online, there's way too much information."

They looked at each other and said, "Connor."

"The thing is," Abby continued, "I can take readings with the things he's built already. That should help."

The stone had a hole in it. He reached his hand through to see if he could feel a buzz, as he'd read in some sources, but he didn't feel anything. Abby put the sensor into the hole and it registered … something. She made a note and went on to take another dozen or more readings in various directions and at various heights.

"We've never had any anomalies in this area, have we?" she mused. "Maybe the lines repel them rather than attract them."

He nodded. When she was done, he said, "Pick a direction." She chose the direction that had the strongest magnetic reading, and they headed that way, on the straight path downhill parallel to the river. Directly ahead of them was the next hill, with a small cairn visible at the top.

As they went downhill, the path went through trees a century old, then into an older section that had never been cut. After they were deep into the forest again, well away from anywhere that a directional microphone could hear them, he said, "We have to talk."

"This is about Helen, isn't it?" When he shrugged one shoulder, she continued, "Not that many topics that have to be avoided within the ARC."

"Okay," he said. "This goes no further, right? Not to Connor, not to Cutter." They stopped and he turned toward her, dropping his voice. "I'm having some … doubts about her."

"What kind of doubts? You mean, about her lying like a rug? Or is it something else?"

He stepped over a rock in the trail. "What's she been lying about?"

Abby tapped her fingers. "How long she was traveling. Where she went. What she did. Where she bought clothes. She 'forgets' a lot of things that she's supposed to remember."

"She's been through a lot –" he started to say.

"I know, I know." Abby gestured in a way that made him think she'd cut Helen a lot of slack that he hadn't been noticing. "I think she's been through a lot more than she tells us about. But she's lying, too, even though I'm not always sure what she's lying about, or why. I don't trust her at my back."

He raised his eyebrows, startled. "You think she'd hurt you?"

"I think she doesn't care much about anyone. Not Nick, not you, certainly not Connor or me."

He thought of what he'd accidentally seen in the ARC, and ran his hand through his hair. "All right. You may be right. We have a hypothesis. What are the data points?" They started walking again, picking their way along a deer trail.

"Remember, I didn't know her anywhere near as well as you did," Abby said apologetically, "so tell me if I'm out of line, but I remember her being … nice. Not sappy, but someone I would have liked to know better. She was very kind to me when my foot was a mess. Now, not so much."

"Why?"

"Gut feeling. But Rex doesn't like her now, and he used to chirp at her. She came over for tea a couple of times, brought me books and stuff, and he'd let her scratch his neck. But since she came back she didn't know who he was, and he doesn't like her at all."

He nodded slowly, his eyes on the trail. "What else?"

"You're not going to like this." She glanced up at him then looked straight ahead and said, "She's very likely been raped, somewhere along the line, while she was away."

"And you know this –"

"Things she does and doesn't say." Abby bit her lip, thinking, then said, "I had a flatmate years back who was jumped in a bad part of the city and dragged into an alley; I also volunteered on a rape-crisis hotline when I was at university. You get used to listening to how people talk, what they do and don't say, how their bodies move, how they stand and walk."

"Doesn't mean it's not the same Helen, even if she's gone through more terrible things."

"Did I say she wasn't the same person?" Abby frowned. "What did you notice? We are trading data here, in case you didn't remember that."

He took a deep breath. "She didn't know me. She didn't expect me to be there. Maybe she didn't expect me to be alive, I don't know."

"It was years…"

"Yeah. I know. But she was my mentor, and my friend. She introduced me to Nick and got this whole thing rolling, from the start. It's weird when she looks at me and hasn't a clue."

"That's rough." She held up one hand and they froze while a dozen fallow deer crossed the trail about fifty meters ahead of them, upwind. "Other things, then. She says she was away eight years when it was four. I'm willing to think she's confused because she spent so long jumping through anomalies that it might really be longer for her than for us. But she talked about shopping at stores I've never heard of, and I know all those shopping districts even if I can't generally afford much there." She stopped to take a reading, noted down the result on a pad. "Granted, there's a lot she doesn't want to remember, and I'm on board with some of it – everyone's got stuff they don't like to remember – but there's a difference between not wanting to remember or talk about the rough stuff and getting the facts wrong about things that can be verified."

"Let me ask you something else," he said. They were coming up to the crest of one of the ridges of the hill, where they could walk down the ridgeline as a shortcut to the next section of trail. "Do you think she's aware she's doing it?"

"I don't know," she said slowly. "I can't tell you that." She peered ahead through the trees. "Stephen, am I seeing things, or is there something over there, part way up in that tree?"

He followed her pointing finger. It wasn't any of the trees that he and Helen had marked out as emergency refuges years ago; it wasn't even near any of the same areas. But something green that wasn't a branch or leaf waved idly in the breeze, halfway up against the rough gray trunk.

"Can you climb it?" he asked. "If I throw up a rope to help you with the lower bits?" He considered the size of the limbs further up and concluded that they might not support him.

"Just boost me up to the lowest branch and I can probably climb it from there, but I'll take the rope up with me to make it safer on the return trip."

She scrambled up ten, twenty, twenty-five feet or so, to a place where a branch had broken off, probably hit by lightning, tied one end of the rope around herself, threw it over the next highest branch and back down to him on the ground. "Somebody's been storing things here. There's a tarp with something wrapped in it. Do you want me to bring it down?"

He shook his head. "Can you look through it without being obvious?"

"Sure."

He waited, steadying the end of the rope for her, trying not to think too hard as she held onto the tree with one arm and turned over the tarp with her other hand to look beneath it. She climbed down, and leaned her back against the tree as she caught her breath.

"A couple changes of clothes: shirt, trousers, a fleece jumper, all green or brown. Shoes, socks. Knives, good ones, one of those folding pocket knives with all sorts of attachments and a survival knife about this long," she held her hands apart, "the kind with a blood groove in it, and a sharpening stone. A water bottle, some kind of dried food in plastic. Nothing I recognize. A coil of clear plastic fishline, a couple of hooks. Plastic bags, a light-brown backpack in ripstop nylon." She closed her eyes. When she opened them, her face was unreadable. "Some of the clothes had labels; with others, they've been cut out. But one was missed, half-cut, so I did the rest." She handed him a shirt label: Newbury's of High Street. "Is it possible to have clothes from a place that doesn't exist?"

"You're sure about this?" He turned the label over in my fingers, feeling the way the thread looped on the back of the embroidered scrap of cloth. It felt professional, the way his mother's labels felt. "Maybe it's a small shop, like my mum's near Perth. She has someone who makes up labels for the clothes she designs."

Abby shrugged. "Could be someone who ran a second-story shop and went out of business. Places like that come and go all the time – but these clothes look new. Unworn. They look like they'd fit someone not too much bigger than me. Taller, of course. What do you think is going on, Stephen?"

"I wish I knew."

Her face was troubled. "Do you think Cutter knows?"

He shook his head. "Cutter might suspect something. He wouldn't say anything unless he was certain. And she's his wife, come back after so long. Do you think he'll want to know something is wrong?"

"I'm not sure." She paused. "Part of me wants to sit down with him, and the rest doesn't want to do it because he looks so much happier now," she said. He patted her shoulder in agreement.

They made their way through the trees to the various clearings to check for new tracks. It seemed that the busiest anomalies, the ones where they found new tracks most often, tended to be further from the ley line. Maybe there was an inverse correlation because of the magnetic fields; he decided to add distance from ley lines to the data they were keeping on the anomalies and look for other relationships, such as geological age. There were ley lines all over England; it probably meant nothing but they wouldn't find out unless they looked at the data.

On the way back to the carpark, Abby said, "I told Lester what I thought had happened to Helen, because something like that can affect everyone; if she were to go out with the team and freeze up because of a flashback, someone could get killed. He said he'd find a diplomatic way to offer her counseling, if she'd accept it."

He nodded slowly. "What if that's not what happened? What if it's something else?"

"What?"

He frowned, frustrated. "I don't know. It's a big universe. Have you said anything to Connor?"

"No. Connor can't bluff at cards; he certainly couldn't keep much from Cutter."

* * *

He stopped by the university library on the way to work, instead of going early for target practice, and got one of the young librarians who had arrived long after Helen had disappeared to help him find articles on the long-term psychological effects of deprivation.

One of the studies concerned the women, many of them nurses, who had been held prisoner in detention camps for years at a time during the Pre-Weimar Conflict. There were multiple accounts of the women hoarding not only food but any material things they were given, stealing extra and hiding it because they had learned by experience that anything they had could be taken away from them again for any reason, without warning. The eyewitness accounts from the soldiers who had rescued them were telling. " After what these women had been through, if they wanted to take everything I had with me, they could have it and welcome," one had said. Another had said, "Of course they robbed us blind; we were finding spoiled food tucked away all over the place. It didn't matter. We were just so glad to have found the women alive."

Was Helen hoarding extra clothing, food and survival equipment in a number of places, inside and outside of the Forest, because of the trauma she'd been through? He was starting to think that it might be a fairly healthy, reasoned response, a sign that she intended to triumph over possible future deprivation by being prepared for it.

Maybe the knives in the tree didn't say much for her mental stability, but they were in the tree. She wasn't carrying them around with her, as far as he'd noticed. Not that he'd ever searched her belongings, but he was pretty certain he would have noticed a knife, especially since ownership of larger blades had been outlawed.

He was still waiting for her to look directly at him. She would look at him from the side, or around the corners of things, but not in that straight-on way he was familiar with. It wasn't that she didn't look at him as one would look at a friend, but that she didn't look at him much at all.

Maybe it was as Abby had said, a reaction to past trauma that Helen refused to discuss. He didn't think she had reason to be afraid of him; certainly the old Helen would have laughed at that idea. He decided to try to be a bit more conscientious about his body language when she was around, to try to be as unthreatening as possible. The last thing he ever wanted was for her to be afraid of anything, or to think he'd ever hurt her.

And then, one evening after a fairly boring day that had included target practice, research and meetings, he went back to his flat to find her there already.

She had let herself in, and was reading through his bookcases. He dropped his pack near the entrance and shut the door behind himself.

"I thought I'd just come in." She moved so silently; it made his skin prickle.

"You always could," he said, waiting for a sign from her as to how to go on. He didn't want to alarm or frighten her, but he ached with wanting to touch her.

"Stephen." Her voice was soft, much as it used to be. "I'm sorry. I had such a hard time remembering. I couldn't remember what we were, and then I couldn't remember who knew, and that's just the tip of what is difficult sometimes."

And she looked at him, her eyes dark with unspoken emotion.

"It's all right." He dared to raise a hand to touch her hair, and she rubbed her cheek against his palm, which she never had done before. "How are you feeling?"

"I want –" She leaned in and kissed him, slowly, her hands wandering across his chest, "you."

He couldn't help sighing, wrapping his arms around her – so thin, he could feel her ribs through her clothes – sliding his hands under the back of her sweater and shirt and pushing them off over her head. His eyes were half-closed as he kissed her neck and inhaled that indefinable scent of her skin.

By the time they both had shed their clothes and were all over one another on the bed, it was as if all the time they'd been apart had vanished. She was passionate, nearly ravenous for him, sliding down his body and wrapping her hands and her mouth around him, and he pulled her legs around and kissed his way up them, so that they were echoing one another, tonguestroke for tonguestroke, and he could feel some roundness in her legs over the muscle, as she had been before, and her strength as she wrapped her legs around him. She turned and came back up over him, and he drew her down to himself and wrapped his arms around her as they slid together, and after that he just watched her eyes change and widen, dark brown within dark lashes, widening more, and they rolled so her legs wrapped around him and he could move, oh, he could move, and he did, he did, he did, letting go for once of all reserve, of anything that was thought, losing himself in heat and rhythm and taste and the emotions that rushed through him as his blood rushed in his veins and arteries.

She blinked, looking up at him. "Hello, Stephen."

He kissed her. "Hello, traveler."

Later, after they had napped and awakened, he was letting his fingers explore her, tracing the scars, tracking the dangers she had survived.

"Juvenile icthyosaur. Tasty, after I hit it with a rock a few times."

"And this?" It was a small, deep scar above her ankle.

"Amphicyonid, I think. Bear dog. Stubborn but stupid. I climbed a lot of trees in that era."

He ran his finger along a narrow, slightly pinched scar along her upper arm.

"Pterosaur. Some are better at guarding eggs than others."

"How about this one?"

She gazed at him from under those long lashes. "Thorn bush," she said, and laughed.

He slid down to play with her breasts; he had loved to do that, before. They were smaller now, as she was thinner, and her skin was lightly textured from years of sunshine. He kissed and nuzzled and she stretched next to him and purred like a cat.

And when he opened his eyes he realized the trio of moles wasn't there on her breast.

He kept going, thinking that he had mistaken which one they were on, but they weren't on the other one either. A spark of doubt crackled up his spine, and he finished his kisses, ran his fingertips over her taut stomach, and rolled up to sit at the edge of the bed. "How about some food? I can heat up some meat pies, or we can go down to a pub."

"I don't really have that much time – I'm supposed to meet Nick at the University, he wanted to check something in the old collection. I'll stay to eat another time," she said.

She glanced at the clock, shook her head and put on her clothes quickly.

On the way out the door she paused to kiss him languidly, and he felt the rush through his body, and he smiled and saw her out. When she had left, he leaned his back against the closed door, shut his eyes and thought, steadily, about the bodies of every woman he'd ever slept with, from undergrad onward. Every one was different. Helen and Alison had been the most physically fit, the most able to keep up with him on his own terms. But only Helen had had that trio of moles to the side of her nipple, low enough that it would never show unless she was naked.

And now it was gone.

Not just removed – he'd seen the scars from mole removal on his mother, who during her modeling career when he was a child had had several taken off by excellent plastic surgeons. He remembered smoothing ointment on the ones that were on her back that she couldn't reach, when they were healing after surgery. The scars could be hidden by makeup, and were, but there were still scars. They weren't the thin lines left by plastic surgery tucks and trimming; they were always larger than the moles themselves and deeper, and the scars remained more evident in places where the skin stretched and contracted over time. And although sometimes moles lost their definition and came close to vanishing, they still left a trace, a place where the darkness of the mole lingered, a slight roughness, a difference – and it took longer than four or five years.

But Helen's skin there was unmarked, untextured. It had never had one mole on it, much less three. She had scars nearly everywhere else, and from the condition of her skin she'd lived naked in some warm eras, but there was nothing on her breasts but the traces of deep suntan, fading now, and a few surface scratches that probably had come from that thornbush she'd mentioned or something similar.

_Weigh the evidence_

He was a scientist, he reminded himself.

His head was reeling. His heart was beating as hard as when he'd been chased by the triceratops a month earlier, and the muscles in his legs were shaking.

He didn't know whether to laugh or cry. From the evidence, he'd just had some of the best sex of his entire life while making love to the wrong woman.

* * *

He went out for a late run, a couple of miles to clear his head.

He knew something now about Helen that nobody else knew. What did he want to do with it?

He had evidence that, when combined with what others had noticed, could infer that the Helen Cutter who had come back through the anomaly wasn't the one he had known who had gone into an anomaly to escape a gorgonopsid.

He waited at a crosswalk as the traffic passed.

How different was this Helen Cutter? Good question. She didn't remember a lot of the same things as the Helen he'd known. She was wilder in bed. She did remember things nobody else knew, even different historical events.

She seemed impatient with Nick – well, no change there. But her occasional hostility went much further than her former impatience had.

Traffic was light; he let his shoulders relax as he passed students trudging toward evening classes.

Did it matter if she wasn't the same woman?

It might matter to Nick, not that he could ask about that. He honestly didn't know, and he wasn't going to be the one to raise the matter first.

It could definitely be a security concern to the ARC. Not for nothing had Lester been knighted; he was capable of acting swiftly and without concern for anyone's comfort if he saw need. He used sarcasm and humor as his management tools of choice, but his reputation as the former Prime Minister's hatchet man had been secured by his overseeing the capture of the Buckingham bombers within three days, even before his own superior's funeral arrangements had been completed.

If Helen were a danger to anyone, and if Lester should take official action against her on behalf of the ARC or anyone associated with it – that would probably kill Nick. He'd been through so much already, what with losing her and then finding her again.

Had Nick noticed those missing three moles? Or had Nick simply ignored them, because of his joy in having Helen back? It was something he couldn't ask.

Had Nick not noticed them because she would only make love in the dark? He pushed himself away from that question. For one thing, their sex life wasn't his business; for another, that sort of hiding seemed to indicate that Helen realized she wasn't the right person here and that there was a different Helen Cutter who should be here instead.

His head hurt a bit. He was thinking too much.

_Be body._

He passed the pub and turned up toward the path over the hills; he wasn't ready to eat yet.

There was the cache in the woods, which screamed of planning and forethought. He and Abby had concluded that the odd label meant nothing that could be proven; small shops and boutiques went in and out of business all the time. Some of Helen's forgetfulness could be explained away by various accidents and concussions about which they had no concrete information, though there was no way to explain her history lapses. But now he thought of the cache and wondered when it had been put into the tree, how long it had been there before Helen had shown up at the forester's station. Had she actually come back to their time for the first time when she was found, or had her return been the result of planning?

And if she had been planning it, what did that mean?

He shook his head, slowing his gait as he headed up over the hill, taking the long way to get back.

What would happen if he did say something – anything – and Lester believed him? That was the sticking point, as much as his worry about Nick. If Lester believed that Helen was a security risk, or that she was dangerous to anyone on the team or anyone within the ARC, he'd lift one finger and she'd be in a holding room and might never see the light of day again, no matter what Nick could say or do.

Oh, he might as well walk into an anomaly himself if that happened because he certainly wouldn't have a life with Nick in it any more.

He thought about the team members. Abby was a decent martial artist, and a good shot. She could run, hide, climb and was in good physical condition. Her instincts were trustworthy; if she felt that something was wrong she'd act on that feeling first before trying to chop logic about it. Connor was not quite as strong as Abby, not able as a martial artist, and his shooting was haphazard, but he was inventive, clever, and didn't hesitate to use whatever was available to defend himself or anyone else. And Helen tended to underestimate them, which could only be to their benefit.

The one person he'd worry about most, the one he always worried about most, was Nick, who was brilliant but couldn't shoot well, who wasn't a fighter, and who lived in his head rather than his body far too much of the time. And Nick lived with, worked with and slept with Helen.

He couldn't see anything useful that he could do. Not a solitary thing.

He stood on the hilltop, overlooking the village, and leaned over to stretch his hamstrings, breathing deeply.

Doing nothing was always an option; so was waiting. He could accept Helen at face value for now, until she actively did something that would cause a problem, and then take action. He could confide some of his thoughts to Abby, if he could find a way to say what he'd seen without revealing how he'd seen it.

His mouth twisted wryly; that conversation wouldn't be fun, but he'd talk to her if he had to. He did trust Abby, no matter what, more than he trusted Lester. Lester hadn't exactly been forthright about how well he'd known Helen in the past.

Maybe that would be the safest way to proceed, for all of them.

He turned around and went back downhill toward the pub and dinner.

* * *

And nothing happened for a long time to alarm him.

Helen came over three more times. Sometimes she talked about the ARC, and her sarcasm rivaled Lester's, and he let her ramble on while he listened. Sometimes she was nearly mute, as if recalling some overwhelming trauma, and let him hold her for a long time as they curled up together in bed or on the couch.

Never once did she say the words "open marriage."

He was still withholding judgment. He kept track of things she said that didn't line up, storing them in code in an encrypted file at work, where she was unlikely to find or destroy it. He told Abby that there was a file on 'anomalous details' that he was writing, related to tracking ley line effects – he had glanced aside while saying it, and saw her eyes widen -- and that if something happened and he wasn't available the file should go straight to Lester. When he handed her the scrap of paper with the encryption key, Abby gave him a long straight gaze and then a short, sharp nod and went back to her work.

Connor was busily creating devices to make their lives easier. He'd adapted an oscilloscope for use in finding fast-moving creatures, like those ever-escaping early mammals, and made it small enough to keep in a pocket, alongside the gizmo he'd already made for detecting anomalies. His latest creation measured some kind of radiation or emanation, or possibly the atmosphere on the other side of an open anomaly and estimated the time period that it opened to. So far, it had been tested three times and had been accurate to the era, though not more precise than that.

"It would be very nice to know the weather next time," Nick told Connor, after Stephen and Nick had nearly drowned in returning a clutch of confused amphibians to the Carboniferous Era during what appeared to have been monsoon season.

"Right." Connor nodded sharply, but his grin was huge as he handed them towels. "I'll get to work on that."

The next major event that occurred was that Lester's assistant, Penelope, left for a job back in the Home Office, and Lester hired Oliver Leek as his new assistant. Leek seemed bright enough, a bit overeager at times, but willing to learn about the project and fascinated with the creatures that they were studying. And, surprisingly enough for someone whose sarcasm levels now occasionally passed Lester's (though never at the ARC), Helen seemed to get along well with Leek. He deferred to her experience, asked her questions that she would answer though never ones that could be considered intrusive, and made himself available to assist her as if he were working for her as much as for Lester. Lester appeared to condone this, perhaps from relief that at least Helen was talking more to someone now, regardless of who it was.

From a distance he watched Helen talking to Leek, and didn't know what to make of it. Leek had confusing body language; he could wear a deferential expression with a stance that on anyone else would be borderline arrogant. But Helen, who read body language at survival level, didn't seem concerned.

It had been a rough month. He'd barely avoided being bitten by the arthropleura, if only because he had dodged when the outsized centipede had lunged and it had electrocuted itself on an open circuit box. They'd been briefly overrun by dodos carrying parasites, one of which had killed Connor's flatmate; as a result of this unhappy occurrence Connor had lost his lease and was now looking for a new place to stay.

He overheard Connor begging Abby to let him stay on the couch. "C'mon, just for a little while. A week?" It was a foregone conclusion. Of course she'd let him stay in her spare room, as long as he behaved himself as well as her lizard collection.

Then Connor and Abby had quarreled over something inconsequential, and during that time Abby had narrowly escaped being lunch to a mosasaur that swam into a local reservoir from an anomaly, ate a huge number of the sport fish that were kept there, and left again. If she and Nick hadn't gotten out of the water, and the two of them hadn't gotten farther up on shore than the mosasaur felt comfortable in going, they would have been badly hurt or killed.

On this particular day, they'd had two open anomalies at the same time, just far enough apart to make the logistics a challenge. One had opened onto a Cambrian-era beach, which gave Connor an earlier benchmark for readings than they'd had before. Nothing animal came through, though the air smelled different downwind from the anomaly and Helen had muttered something about really disliking the smell of rotting trilobite, as it had put her off eating fish for weeks. The other had opened not too far from the reconstructed iron fence, now with the bottom of each stake encased in concrete. It was hard to tell what was going on; there was something like a brief windstorm, and the fence was ripped from its footing and pulled apart in two places, but there were no distinguishable footprints. And the guard who had called in the report was missing.

Nick had looked at the fence and told Connor to get his readings from a distance, preferably from inside the Range Rover with the windows up. He called Lester, who took one look at the fence from the phone photo Nick sent him and ordered an armored vehicle for the guard on site.

"There's absolutely no reason for us to lose people when we've got the equipment to keep them safe," Lester told Ryan, the SAS officer who was primarily assigned to the team. "I realize it's your call, but I want all our people protected, not just Cutter's people."

Ryan raised an eyebrow at the way the wrought-iron bars had been bent, and ordered the soldiers posted to take all necessary precautions.

But nothing seemed to be going on for hours. Finally, Nick told the team to go home, but to keep their mobiles on. "I don't expect anything, but you know how that goes."

It had been a long, tiring day. When he came back to his flat that evening he was expecting to heat up a Tesco meat pie, open a bottle of beer, sit down with a magazine or book and put his feet up, and be ready to leave again as soon as his mobile rang. But when he picked up his mail, there was a large envelope postmarked from South Africa that he turned over curiously, looking for a return address but finding only an illegible smear of rain-washed ink.

It was a letter from Alison, telling him that she was marrying another botanist who worked on the project, that the project was a great success and was being expanded to parts of Namibia and South Africa, where her fiancé was from.

His eyesight blurred, reading her careful handwriting. He stumbled over to the bed, to sit on its edge and read the rest:  


>   
> We made a good couple, Stephen, and I won't ever deny that. But I know you, love. You won't want to settle down with anyone to have a family for years, because you're so tied up in your work that you don't see anything or anyone else that clearly. I didn't mind that, please don't think I did. My work is very important to me, too, and we shared that dedication to a higher goal even if it wasn't the same one.
> 
> But I do want to be settled and to start a family, and much as I care about you, it's not the same as the way I feel about Pieter. He and I can build a life together in ways that you and I couldn't, and that's something I want to do.
> 
> I want you to know that I will always care about you as a friend, one with whom I shared important times, wonderful times. You will always be welcome to stay with us whenever you are in the area…  
> 

There was an address at the end, to which she asked him to ship a few books she'd left behind in his bookcase.

Well, fuck.

He hadn't been holding out great hopes for her return, though it was nearly two years. He hadn't been counting the days. He'd been too busy with the ARC, with Helen, with the confusing, frustrating, exhausting and enjoyable work of wrangling whatever came through the next anomaly that opened and getting it home or removing the danger it might pose. He hadn't even thought through how Alison, if she had returned, might fit into his life now.

To tell the truth, he hadn't thought of Alison at all for weeks. The realization made his stomach churn. He'd gotten so caught up in concern for Helen, and in the odd, furtive relationship she'd pulled him into, that he hadn't even realized how he would have to deal with Alison's return – and now Alison wasn't coming back.

So much for dinner. He tossed the rest of the mail on the bedside table for later and went back out again, to find a noisy pub with a pack of rugby fans watching the telly, where he could try to forget the way it felt like his stomach was full of tumbling rocks that bruised his heart.

* * *

Two pints and a sandwich later, he came home and collapsed on the bed, worn down and asleep nearly immediately.

He was awakened by the phone. According to the clock, he'd overslept by an hour. "Stephen, get in here. We've got a problem."

"What is it?"

"Something has killed a lion at Abby's zoo, and probably taken the zoo director as well."

He was already vertical and headed toward the bathroom. "How's Abby?"

"Shaken. She was talking to the man only a little earlier; she'd been back to consult on something."

"On my way."

He couldn't forego the shower – he could smell the stink of cheap cigarettes on himself -- but he made it fast, shaved with the electric razor, and was out the door in ten minutes, eating a microwaved meat pastie wrapped in paper that he held in one hand as he drove.

* * *

Nick, his jaw muscles clenching, stared at the photos of the lion enclosure and the bloodstain on the pavement outside. Helen looked pale under her fading tan, her eyes dark and wide. Lester paced in the back of the room, behind the table where Stephen, Abby and Connor sat. Ryan stood leaning against the wall, listening intently.

"I've been worried about this happening," Helen said, as if from nowhere. "I wasn't sure that it could. In my experience, the anomalies from this particular era only opened very briefly and nothing came through, so I took the chance on going through. It nearly killed me."

"What was it?" Abby had Nick's good tweed jacket around her shoulders, but was shivering anyway. She kept her hands wrapped around a mug of hot tea and looked as if she were fighting off a ferocious headache, which told him that she was far more frightened than she wanted to appear. Stephen moved closer on his chair and she leaned against his arm.

Connor, on Abby's other side, was barely contained in his chair. Plainly, he wanted to be out there doing something to fix whatever had upset Abby so much, and was frustrated that so far that hadn't happened.

"It doesn't have a name. I call it the predator."

"It doesn't have a name?" he asked.

"Everything has a name," Nick said. "What era is it from?"

Helen's gaze was hard and steady, the direct look of the old Helen. "The future."

"The future?" Nick looked blank. "How far into the future?"

Helen shook her head. "I don't know." But she looked away and back again.

Abby pushed her shoulder back against Stephen's and tilted her head, and he gave her the slightest possible nod; yes, Helen was lying about something again.

"I had Tim in the lab analyze the blood samples we took from the Forest and from the zoo," Connor said. "There's a lot of bat DNA and things that aren't identifiable. Tim said the bat DNA looked as if it was mixed with ape and a lot of other things, like someone's science project. Maybe pit viper and shark, too."

Abby shuddered. Stephen put his arm around her.

Lester stopped pacing. "Genetic experimentation?" His tone was arctic.

"Is there any chance that something like that could come from the ARC?" Nick asked.

"No." Lester's headshake was definite. "Not only are we not capable of it yet, we are not going to be capable of it, if I have anything to say about the matter. The ARC is an institute for the study of the prehistoric past and its incursions into the present; it does not have a mandate for any sort of recombinant genetic experimentation, and I personally will deal severely with anyone who attempts it."

"I don't know what era the creature was developed in, but it comes from some time in the future. I don't know how long ahead." Helen leaned on a chair, her hands gripping its back so tightly that her knuckles shone ivory in the light. "I ran across the creature in its own time, entirely by accident, and barely escaped back through the anomaly before it closed." She closed her eyes. "The landscape is ruined, devastated. There are a few buildings on something like islands in that devastation, and the creatures rule there. They climb walls, they move more swiftly than we can see them. They find their prey by echolocation, or perhaps by infrared heat like pit vipers, and they eat anything."

"How big are they?" he asked. "What do they look like?"

"Gray, like apes from hell with enormous heads and nearly no eyes. Too many teeth. Hands with claws and opposable thumbs. They run on their knuckles like gorillas, but they move so quickly that they can run sideways and upside down within an enclosed space. They can climb and jump anywhere there's a surface."

"So how do we fight them?" Ryan's eyes looked tired, but his face was stone. "I've already lost a riot-trained canine unit to this creature. Thank god we had the tank for the others."

"I don't know," Helen admitted. "I wasn't able to fight it at all." She rubbed her scarred arm with the other hand, as if unconsciously reliving her escape.

"How strong is it?" Abby asked, looking up at Helen. "It ripped through the zoo's heavy-duty wire fencing and lifted out an adult male lion of nearly 300 kilos. Can it overturn a car?"

"That's a good question." Helen tilted her head, considering. "I don't know. It doesn't have the sheer bulldog musculature of a gorgonopsid. It's wiry. It will break through things rather than tip them over, if that helps any."

Abby shrugged, but nodded her thanks. She huddled a little closer inside Stephen's arm. Connor looked angry, but he was scowling at the wall, not at Stephen.

Helen's expression was nearly blank, he realized, because she was quietly terrified and didn't want it to show. Too many teeth, she had said. He remembered the marks on her left arm, the row of deep punctures that she had never talked about.

"Is there any way to seal an anomaly?" Nick asked. "They're magnetic, right, Connor? Can you use the opposite end of the field to close them, like north- and south-ended magnets?"

Connor thought a moment. "I could try," he said slowly, "but I can't guarantee that I'd be able to get it together for this one."

"Couldn't we just toss an A-bomb through?" Lester's voice sounded wistful. "That would be easy. We have a lot of them."

"We couldn't control the way the explosion or radiation might splash back through the anomaly," Connor said. "Not until I can find a way to close an anomaly on demand so nothing comes back through."

"Pity. I'll keep that thought in reserve."

"Unfortunately, that doesn't take care of whatever is running around out there now," Nick said. "Stephen, are you up to tracking?"

He nodded. "Whenever you want."

Lester's mouth set hard in a line. "Nobody goes out alone. Captain Ryan, your orders with this creature are to shoot to kill. Take every precaution. I want vests on every person out there, including you, Cutter, in case of stray bullets. We shall have no friendly fire deaths." He glanced at the group around the table. "You all have firearms permits and I'm ordering every one of you to go armed. If this thing can pick off the most experienced canine unit we have, both dog and man, it may be that one of you will have a better chance for a shot at it if it slows down." He looked at them all. "Please be careful. I do not want to have to explain anyone's death to Her Majesty."

Ryan nodded. "I'll alert Gunnery Sergeant Simmons."

"Are you up to coming out with us?" Nick asked Abby.

She shook her head. "Give me a little while. I'll help Connor here first."

"Okay. Be sure that you're armed and accompanied when you do leave here."

She nodded. "I'm not going to take chances with something that could take out Claudius. He was as big as the lions of Tsavo, and very smart. Something that could kill him without a fight – "

"Not without a fight," Connor said. "Remember the blood sample."

Abby nodded, one tear trailing down her cheek. "Good for you, Claudius. Good for you."

* * *

"What's with you?" Nick asked him as they drove to the Forest. Ryan and Helen were coming in another Range Rover. "You look like you were out on patrol with the troops."

"Alison wrote me; she's getting married."

"I'm sorry." Nick's voice was compassionate. "Where is she now?"

"Somewhere in South Africa. She's been in Botswana, near the Kalahari, and I think she's moving closer to Johannesburg."

It was five miles before Nick spoke again. "Well, that would be an awfully long commute to the ARC."

He didn't want to talk about Alison any more than he wanted to talk about Helen, or to think about how she looked this morning in a khaki-colored shirt, her hair on her shoulders. He glanced out the window. "Do you ever get tired of being on the front lines in an undeclared war? One that we can't even talk about?"

"All the time, Stephen. All the bloody time."

* * *

The trail was maddening; there were so few marks on the ground that it was more a theory than a trail. It curled and spiraled, so that occasionally tracks covered tracks at 90 degrees, it left the ground – it must have, because of the gaps between footprints – and the creature's stride when running had to be ten meters or more at times.

Once he heard an odd, almost-mechanical chitter and froze, but by the time his muscles stilled it was gone, only to return from another direction. It had moved 180 degrees in less than a second, from behind him and on the same level to above and in front of him. The sound itself was terrifyingly alien. He was as glad of the vest he wore as of the rifle in his hands.

Everything went to hell too fast.

They found the baby predators – _and isn't that an odd combination of words_ \-- in the shed at the zoo, next to the bodies of the missing soldier, the dog, the lion and Abby's former boss. All of them had been selectively eaten, with the soft bellies, faces and thigh muscles gone. Both Abby and Connor had turned green and lost their breakfasts into a couple of crates. He'd nearly joined them himself, and some of the soldiers weren't far from doing it, either.

Nick killed the adult in the greenhouse, shooting out the glass around it so it couldn't triangulate on his location. When the rest of them reached him, Nick's face was granite, the muscles hardened. "We have to make sure these don't go anywhere in the past," he said. "There has to be another adult somewhere, and we need to put a stop to any more of them coming through in the Permian."

Ryan, who was supervising as his soldiers shoved the baby predators none too kindly into a metal crate, said, "What then?"

"We kill them." Nick's voice was still thick with suppressed emotion. "They cannot be allowed to live in the past or in our time."

"Fine by me," Ryan said. "I'd just as soon do these now."

Helen, who had come to stand by Nick, shook her head. "We'll need them as bait to draw the other parent and any other adults to us." The way her eyes flashed made Stephen want to stay close by; for a moment she seemed as dangerous as the creatures. "And to find where the future anomaly is in the Permian Era."

"We'd better have tanks there, then, sir," Ryan said to Lester, who had arrived to oversee matters and who was recoiling in distaste from the dead adult predator.

"No," came from Nick. Lester raised his eyebrows, but Nick continued, "The entire point of going back there is to keep the timeline intact. We can't take anything back that couldn't be left there."

"You think these creatures are going to discover automated weaponry if we do?"

Helen took a step forward. "They're too intelligent already. Why give them something to study?"

"You have a point," Lester admitted.

"We need to find the anomaly through which the predators came into the Permian, and close it," Helen said. "And I'm coming with you."

Nick opened his mouth to protest, but closed it again.

But they didn't have a way to close it yet, Stephen thought but did not say. Connor hasn't invented one.

"You will take all possible care, I trust," Lester said to her; she nodded but her eyes were black and looking at Nick, not Lester.

Abby sent a warning glance to Stephen, which he didn't ignore. "I'm going, too."

"No," Nick said. "The fewer of us there, the fewer chances to disrupt things. I'll go with Helen."

"And Captain Ryan and his men. My orders," Lester said. "The rest of us will wait by the anomaly. If you need any further assistance, throw something – anything -- through the anomaly and we will send in help."

* * *

Helen went back with him on a supply run to the ARC; Lester had phoned ahead and with the armed troops guarding the team he could be spared for the run. He kept watching her out of the corner of his eye. Her pupils were blown open, the way they were after sex, and her eyes were so dark they were nearly black.

"Are you all right?" he asked, aiming for casual and concerned.

"It's all right, Stephen. I've been there before."

"That's not what I asked."

She turned to look at him. "You're worried about me. " Was she surprised?

He didn't return her look but kept driving.

"Don't you think I can manage in the Permian?"

"I think," he said carefully, "you could manage anywhere you wanted to. But you've had such a hard time, some of the time. I don't want you getting hurt."

"Stephen, you're quite the sweetest man in the world." She sounded more honest than sarcastic, for which he was grateful. "Think of me as the native guide on this safari."

He kept driving. It didn't help to suddenly have one of Hemingway's African stories running through his mind. He hoped against hope that Lester would not arm Helen, and that she would not be as good a shot as Francis Macomber's wife.

At the ARC, staff ran out and loaded the supplies and extra weaponry. "Give me a moment, please," Helen said, and went inside. When she returned she was carrying a light backpack. "My survival gear," she told him.

_a light-brown backpack in ripstop nylon_

"Are you sure you have enough?" he asked.

"We're not building a vacation house there, Stephen. It'll be fine."

He didn't say a word when she turned on the radio on the way back to a FM station playing progressive jazz -- exactly the kind of music she would have complained about while retuning the radio to a classic rock station, in the years before the ARC was built.

* * *

Four soldiers went into the anomaly, two carrying the metal supply locker and two carrying a metal animal crate filled with squalling baby predators, followed by Captain Ryan.

Helen waited next to the anomaly for Nick, who was being outfitted for the trip by Connor.

"You're going to need these." Connor handed him the latest versions of the creature finder and the anomaly identifier, and he stowed them in the oversized pockets of his trousers. "And this."

"What is it?" Nick turned it over in his fingers, flipped it and pressed it until it opened out.

"One of those survival tool things, like a pocket knife gone mad. It's got a magnifier, blades, a little saw, all sorts of things." Connor's voice dropped a bit. "It's not that I think you're going to need it. It's for luck. You know, first time through into the Permian and all."

"Okay. For luck." Nick smiled at Connor. "Thanks."

Abby, who had been waiting by the side, came over to him. "Take care, professor." She handed him a little packet. "Late birthday present. You can open it when you get back."

"What is this? I'm only going through for a few minutes, maybe a day."

Abby shrugged. "The military has all sorts of special equipment. Why shouldn't you have some?"

"Mother hens, that's what you are, the lot of you." But Nick looked pleased, nonetheless. "What, you, too?" he said as Stephen came up to walk next to him.

Stephen shook his head. "We're going to wait here until you get back."

"I'll get back, depend on it. And if I don't --"

Their eyes locked. Stephen knew they were both remembering Helen's flight from the gorgonopsid.

"—I'll keep an eye on the others."

"Good man." And Nick started for the anomaly.

He couldn't let Nick go like that. He ran up next to him, let his voice drop. "Be careful of Helen. She's not quite there sometimes."

Nick's eyes went wide, then narrowed. "Something you want to tell me?"

He shook his head, overwhelmed. So much could not be said. "Just … be careful."

"Okay, mother hen." And Nick clapped him on the shoulder and walked through, followed by Helen, who gave him one backward glance he couldn't decipher as she left.

The anomaly widened to receive them, then flowed back to its original size.

His phone rang. "Stephen, this is Tim at the lab. The carcass you lot sent in was male."

"You're sure?"

"Definite. Can't mistake a dong like that." He hung up.

"What is it?" Connor asked.

"The creature Nick killed in the greenhouse was male."

"Couldn't be."

Abby, who had come closer while he was on the phone, said, "The mother's still out there? Here?" She shivered.

"Maybe in that species baby-tending is a job for the boys," Connor said thoughtfully.

Something whizzed past them. Connor took a misstep, jarring the table where the larger-sized oscilloscope sat, the one that had been used as a prototype and that came with them to every anomaly-site camp. The oscilloscope was clicking madly until it hit the ground.

The anomaly flared again and subsided.

Connor crouched to check it out. "Broken. That's not good."

"But the creature's gone in," Abby said. "I think. We can't tell now, can we?"

Connor shook his head. "Not until we get another oscilloscope sent over from the lab. I'll call for one."

The sense of unease he'd felt with Helen flashed over him. "I really don't like this."

"You've been like a bear with a sore paw all morning, Stephen," Abby told him. "What's going on?" She stood a little closer to him, watching the anomaly, as Connor walked toward the nearest soldier to make his call.

"It's personal."

"We're friends, aren't we?"

"Yeah." He tried to smile a bit, but wasn't sure if it had worked from her expression. "I got Dear Johnned by my girlfriend."

"Oh. I'm so sorry. Did she come over last night?"

He shook his head. "Letter. She's getting married." When he saw her start to say something, he added, "She's in Africa. Not easy to just ring up and come over."

Abby nodded and stood next to him for a while. "I'm sorry," she said quietly. "You want some tea? I brought a thermos."

It wouldn't change how he felt, but the early morning damp was still on the plants around them; until the day's warmth cleared it, he'd be feeling the damp through his jeans. "Sure. Thanks."

Lester walked over in his latest chalk-stripe suit. Did he have an entire closet of them? "How long do you think it will be?"

"No way to tell. Too many variables."

"Pity. I'm going to have to cancel a luncheon date, again."

"I'm sure they'll have food left when you get there."

Lester almost smiled, but sobered immediately. "Was it my imagination, or was Helen just a bit different today?" The Kevlar vest put odd lines into his shirt and jacket but somehow did not ruin their elegant cut. Did Lester have his bullet-proof vest custom tailored?

"Not your imagination." The tea did taste good, just sweet enough and very strong.

"She seemed almost dissociative at times. When she returns, I shall insist that she see a counselor."

"Good luck with that."

"I noticed a bit of surreptitious gift-giving to the professor." Lester raised an eyebrow. "It's not Cutter's birthday, so what else is going on?" He looked Stephen over shrewdly. "Or, to put it another way, what do you know that I should know?"

Abby and Connor had gone back to the Range Rover, where Abby had taken out the tranquilizer rifle and was showing Connor how to use the sights to find a target. From Connor's gestures, he wasn't having an easy time of it, but that wasn't unexpected; the thing was badly unbalanced, stock-heavy.

What mattered, right then, was that they were out of earshot.

"What I know now," he said quietly, "and didn't know when we talked before, is that the Helen whom we've been dealing with for the last two years isn't the woman whom Nick married and who ran into an anomaly six years ago."

He never thought he'd succeed in breaking Lester's determined façade, but broken it was. Lester stared at him hard, his expression as open as Stephen had ever seen it. "How do you know?"

"You said you'd keep confidential what I learned and how. Is that still true?"

Lester nodded. "Yes, I will, though I might regret it." He turned to look at the anomaly as if they were talking about the weather.

"Helen and I used to have … a thing. Back before she left. She and Nick had an open marriage of sorts, and I was her lover." It felt so strange to be saying this aloud. "This Helen didn't know me when she arrived, didn't know how to act around me. And then she showed up one day."

"And? Or should I not ask?" Still no sarcasm.

"She's missing a birthmark. Three moles you'd never ordinarily see, as they're covered by clothes. The other Helen had them. This one doesn't have them, or removal scars." He gulped tea and swallowed hard. "Add that to all the other data points, the things she talked about, the things she didn't know."

"Yes. I see." Lester's eyes closed and stayed closed for a moment, as if he were mourning a loss. When he opened his eyes again, his face hardened as he stared determinedly at the anomaly. "And you couldn't find a way to let me know until now, when Cutter's alone with her?"

He shrugged, frustrated, and dropped his voice to near-inaudibility. "What could I say? Oh, by the way, I'm sleeping with my professor's wife and she's an imposter?"

Lester's mouth twisted. "I take your point. But you have been keeping an eye on her."

He nodded. "So has Abby. Maybe Connor as well." He glanced aside at the soldiers, at the sparkling light. "Cutter's been alone with her every day for nearly two years, and he didn't ever say anything about her being different." Another sip of tea, now cooling. "I didn't think there was a danger until this morning. You didn't arrive on site until just before they left, and I was with one or the other of them all the rest of the time, so I couldn't phone. And you noticed how she was in the meeting."

Lester heaved a sigh. "All right. Who else knows about this?"

"About what I found? Nobody. Connor and Abby have their own suspicions of her, but Connor hasn't talked to me. Abby did, after she talked to you, but I haven't told her."

The lines around Lester's mouth looked unhappy. "We'll just have to hope that four Special Forces troops and Captain Ryan can protect Cutter from his wife."

Stephen shot him a sideward glance. "I don't suppose you've read Hemingway's African stories."

Lester's eyebrows went up. "I fully expect that Captain Ryan and his men are far more capable bodyguards than the Macombers' guide." He nodded to himself. "I'll tell Leek to cancel anything else today, if possible. Where'd you get that tea? I haven't had my coffee yet." Lester went back toward the carpark, taking out his phone as he walked. Beyond him, Connor was still attempting to level the rifle properly, with Abby coaching him and one of the soldiers offering suggestions.

* * *

The anomaly flickered closed barely one hour after Cutter, Helen and the soldiers went in.

Lester strode over to Connor. "What's going on?"

"I don't know." Connor was frantically checking his devices, including the spare oscilloscope from the ARC. "The magnetic field was strong enough to keep it open for hours. Something must have happened on that side."

Lester's eyes locked with Stephen's.

"We're going to stay here until it's open again. That's what I promised Cutter," Stephen said.

"Of course we're staying." Lester frowned. "Stephen, I have to go back to the office; apparently Leek was unable to cancel some of the wretched meetings I must attend." He shook his head. "I never said this, but there are times when I would triple Penelope's salary in order to get her back at the ARC. She may not have been ideal for the job, but when I told her to cancel a meeting she damned well did it." He shrugged his jacket into place again. "You will call me the instant anything happens?"

"Count on it." He waved his own mobile, made sure it was on and charged, and put it into his shirt pocket.

The day seemed to take forever to pass. Just after midday, a catering truck arrived with basic boxed lunches for them all, sandwiches and fruit and a drink. They took turns eating, never leaving the anomaly unguarded or anyone unaccompanied.

Connor, who had given up on the tranquilizer rifle for the moment, had the broken oscilloscope in pieces on a table and was trying to fix it with a Swiss army knife. Abby had a digital camera out and was photographing plants.

Stephen watched her setting up a shot. "Why?"

"Botany wants before-photos of anywhere an anomaly opens, so they can keep track of the site and check out anything unusual that happens to grow later on."

He nodded. "Could've finished my thesis, waiting like this."

"I thought I remembered you doing that already."

"Start another one?"

Connor gave a cry of either delight or despair, and immediately dived under the table. "Lost a screw down here."

Abby glanced at Connor, then over at Stephen. "I'm just not going to say it."

"Nope. No way."

"Okay, found it!" Connor scrambled back up and went back to muttering over his equipment.

Abby giggled, and he felt a smile on his own face. "They want downwind photos too. Which is –" she turned slowly.

"Thataway." He pointed. "Want company?"

"Definitely." She waved a hand toward the pistol he carried, and tucked her own into the back of her trousers. "Just in case."

"How far?"

Abby squinted at the bushes around them. "A few yards. Nothing strange has been found more than thirty yards from an anomaly so far, and there's not much breeze today."

He glanced around. "That's still within the outer perimeter; we should be fine."

So they wandered from one small clearing to another, along the gaps between trees and Abby took innumerable photos of ordinary bushes and trees and the ground, and nothing happened, but it was better than just standing and staring at where the glowing ball of angular sparkling shards had been, and waiting for it to open again.

Connor met them as they returned. "Magnetic field's going wild." And as they walked back into the clearing the anomaly bloomed open again, as if it had never closed.

Stephen hit the automatic dial on his mobile. "Lester. Anomaly's open again."

"Yes," Lester replied, and broke off the call.

"I don't understand this." Connor had his anomaly detector on and was shaking his head. "It's just the same strength as before. It's as if someone hit an on-off switch."

"There isn't one, is there?"

"Well, we don't have one." Connor looked frankly envious. "I'd love to be able to turn them off, or seal them, keep the nasty critters from getting out, but I haven't figured that out yet." A metal pen from the table flew into the anomaly. "It's getting stronger."

"Keep hold of your weapons; the anomaly's magnetism is increasing," one of the soldiers told the others.

"How can this be happening?" Abby asked. "Tell me something cheering," she demanded of Connor.

Connor checked his devices. "According to this, it's either the same anomaly re-opening, or it goes to the same exact time zone in the past. It's not something from someplace else that randomly decided to be here."

"Well, that's something."

Within ten minutes a vehicle engine roared toward them and skidded into the carpark. Lester emerged from a small sportscar that had Abby's eyes widening. "What do we know?" he said as he caught up with them.

"It's going to the same place, same era. The readings are identical." Connor squinted. "There's this one little – no, no, it's okay." He adjusted a knob on the device. "It looked just a little off for a moment, but it's fine now."

"That's good, I hope." Lester looked the anomaly over as if he were considering buying it. "I'll have you know, I walked out of a meeting with the deputy prime minister, who wants to talk about patents, industrial development and trade possibilities from inventions within the ARC."

"I'm sorry," Connor began, but Lester waved a hand.

"Don't be. Boring chap. Hasn't a clue what we do here, but wants to make money off it." He gave the devices in Connor's hand and on the table a shrewd glance. "When it's the proper time for such things, they'll be discussed. Not now. And when it is, I expect the ARC's chief inventor will want to be in on the discussions."

"Ooh. Yes." Connor brightened. "Chief inventor?"

Lester awarded him a small smile. "Don't let it go to your head."

Before Connor could reply the anomaly flickered. Connor quickly set the devices to automatic and put them into position on the table where they could collect readings without human intervention. Abby came to stand next to Connor by the table, looking worried. She had a pistol in her hand, down by her leg, and caught Stephen's eye before she gestured at Connor, who was so busy he wasn't noticing that he'd put his own pistol down on the other end of the table. Stephen moved a little closer to them, hoping that he would be ready for whatever showed up.

Nick strode out of the anomaly, flaming angry, as if he were throwing off sparks wider than the anomaly flickers. Helen, who followed on his heels, had the sort of purposeful lack of expression that made Stephen instantly wary. It was the expression she'd had in the vehicle that morning, as if she had much more important things going on and was ready to dispense with whatever got into her way.

"What happened? Did you find the anomaly?" Lester asked.

"Captain Ryan didn't make it," Nick said slowly, "and all his men are dead." While they were absorbing that, he added, "Whatever happens, nobody goes back through." His hands were covered in dirt, as if he'd been digging with them, and there were dark spatters on his arms and the front of his jacket that looked like blood.

He could hear the intake of sudden shocked breaths all around the clearing as they absorbed his words. While they were still taking in the fact that the men they knew weren't coming back, Helen narrowed her eyes at Nick, as if he were ice and she were a blowtorch, and shrugged past him. "Well, I'm sorry to break your new rule so soon, Nick, but I'm not staying."

"Well, what'd you come back through for?"

"A little unfinished business."

Stephen's eyes narrowed, watching this woman who was not the Helen he knew. If he'd been unsure of the difference before, now he was certain of it. Her body language was wrong. This woman wasn't the independent, capable rock scrambler and teacher he knew and loved.

This woman walked like a predator who feared no one. He wasn't sure he was looking at someone who still understood what it meant to be human.

"You see, Nick, it was just one of those things. I was lonely, and you didn't seem to care about me –"Helen's tone was like poisoned candy, "and Stephen was so … sweet. And attentive." She rotated her head toward him, stalked toward him and attempted to lay claim to him in front of the team, Lester, the military and Nick. "Oh, you mean you never told him? Oh, dear."

Lester was ignoring the exchange, but Stephen could all but see the gears turning in his head, cross-checking the intelligence on the former Helen with this one. At least he was not looking in Stephen's direction; the same couldn't be said of Connor, Abby or the Special Forces patrol.

He didn't have words to describe the shock on Nick's face.

It was a nightmare come true. Helen was flaying the parts of his life that he'd shared with her, publicly, for her own pleasure. He had never felt more like a target in his life. At least he'd already spoken to Lester; if the earth opened to swallow him now, as he wished it would, perhaps Lester would find a crew to dig him out, or at least erect a  
marker: here lies a stupid, stupid man.

"You see, I don't want to be on my own any more," Helen continued, in that same false voice.

The soldiers were shifting position behind Lester and Connor, and he could see them evaluating what sort of threat might be offered by Helen, or himself. Connor, stalwart, was facing down Helen with stubborn disbelief, but Abby refused to look at either of them.

Nick's expression of shock, followed by betrayal, followed by deep intense pain, cut him to the core. Nick looked, in fact, as if someone had run a sword through his vitals and he was bleeding out without a bandage.

"You once said you'd do anything for me if I gave you the chance. Well, here it is: come with me."

She was looking him in the face, but there was nobody home behind her eyes.

Had Helen been lying, all these years ago, about them having an open marriage? Had he imagined the talk in Nick's kitchen where he had so gently been told to go elsewhere for love, and where the thought of loving both of them had been briefly raised? But this wasn't Helen, he kept telling himself. This wasn't the Helen they'd both loved and lost. This was an imposter who lied, who was using them for her own ends.

"Don't do this," he warned her.

"Falling for one of your students is never a good idea, but sometimes these things just happen, you know." She had turned away from him to face Nick, who looked angry.

"How could you keep that from me for so many years?" Nick's voice was a growl.

No time for that now. No time for anything other than telling Nick the truth: what had happened with Helen – the real Helen -- had occurred a long time ago, it wasn't worth bringing it up.

He stepped around Helen; if she stabbed him in the back with one of her knives, she wouldn't get two steps without a bullet in her. At this point he'd almost welcome the knife if it would remove Nick's anger and suspicion.

"There was no point in saying anything," he told Nick. "It was a long time ago, in the past."

And he was telling the truth. He had slept with Helen, his and Nick's Helen, long ago. He would never apologize for loving her.

"The past has a habit of coming back these days, doesn't it?" Helen commented.

The woman who was filleting them both with her words was not his Helen, was not the woman who had laughed as she'd danced in her green wedding dress.

How could Nick not have figured that out? How could he think this vicious bitch was his Helen, the brilliant, kind woman they had both loved?

Unless –

Unless this woman was this Nick's Helen, the only one he knew.

There was more than one Helen Cutter. But this Nick didn't seem to see this Helen's behavior as different from the usual. Could there be –

Nick turned away from him in silent rejection.

"Are you coming?" she asked.

"You know, I'd forgotten, Helen." He put an edge into his words. "Sometimes you can be a real bitch." And he turned and walked away from her, to stand behind Lester in a show of support for the status quo.

Apparently Helen was satisfied to wound only with words for now. She left, none too soon, and behind her Nick continued to look pale and battered, a dozen years older than that morning.

That wasn't far from how he himself felt, as if she'd tied him out and left him with his guts out drying in the sun.

_My Helen wouldn't do this. Our Helen wouldn't do this. Why don't you see that?_

But then Nick started asking about someone named Claudia Brown, whom none of them knew, and the more he saw their confusion the more frantic he became. Stephen racked his brain for anyone answering to that name and came up empty. He saw Lester running through a mental catalog of all the ARC employees and shaking his head. Even the soldiers stationed at the ARC were shaking their heads and looking blank.

And Nick turned to run back into the collapsing anomaly.

He and Connor went after Nick, but he was closer. He grabbed Nick with both arms, holding him back, hugging him close despite Nick's struggles to be free.

"She's not here! Somehow we've changed things. I have to make things right!" When the anomaly collapsed in on itself and vanished, Nick collapsed, too, his resistance apparently sapped.

Stephen let go, backed up, uncertain. Was he going to have to try to explain an alternate Nick to Lester now?

Nick was acting like a madman, insisting that this Claudia Brown had to be there somewhere. When Nick grabbed Lester's lapels and yelled at him, Stephen moved between them and the nearest soldier, who was close to lining up a shot. Lester himself looked frightened, though he compensated for that with searing sarcasm after Nick let go. Stephen spent a breath being thankful that none of the current invective was aimed at himself, then ashamed for feeling that way. If he hadn't spoken with Lester, earlier, it might be much worse. At least one person knew what he knew, the one bit of rational evidence that bid fair to explain so much if only it could be spoken without destroying everything.

"He's fine," Abby said to Lester, as she watched Nick, but her brow was furrowed with worry.

Nick collapsed, staring back at the empty space between the trees where the anomaly had closed.

* * *

Stephen leaned against the Range Rover, watching Nick, watching the others moving around him. He thought about all of the time they'd spent together, in happiness and sorrow and ordinary life. He'd never seen such an expression of existential horror as Nick wore now.

_Weigh the evidence_, the voice in his mind always told him. Sometimes it was Nick's voice, from a class long ago; sometimes it was Helen's voice, talking with him over the kitchen table after dinner at the house, pushing him to think harder about his work.

_Weigh the evidence. Devise your hypothesis. Test it. Revise as necessary, until you can find a hypothesis – a thesis – supported by your evidence that explains all of your observations. And then go forward with that. _ That was Nick.

_They call it scientific method for a reason, Stephen. It's not true until it's been proven. Don't always ignore data because it's outside your hypothetical parameters. Outliers are there to show you that you're missing something._ Helen's voice always came with the remembered taste of tea and cakes, eaten over the top of open books, journals and papers.

He watched as Nick picked himself up, looking more shaken than at any time in the past decade, and got slowly into the Range Rover. Abby and Connor had already seated themselves in back.

As he drove back to the ARC, his mind examined the data points that were piling up all around him:

Point one: Cutter's obvious hostility toward Helen, which hadn't been there when they went through the anomaly together earlier in the day;

Point two: Helen's vindictiveness in outing her putative relationship with him before Nick, the team and Lester, doing her best to drive apart and destroy the people she was leaving behind;

Point three: Cutter's insistence that someone named Claudia Brown, to whom he obviously was deeply attached, should have been there even though nobody had ever heard the name before.

Three incidents, three data points did not make a study. They were only more outliers, observations that didn't fit the accepted explanations, arrows pointing toward the need for a different hypothesis.

At the ARC, he veered off into the lab where he'd left his old jacket a few days earlier. If he'd realized that he would be working into the night, he would have brought a better one from the flat. Through the glass he saw Nick looking around as if he'd never been there before, reacting as if he didn't know Oliver Leek when Stephen knew that he and Helen had been talking with Leek about research support earlier that week. He'd been in the same meeting, discussing the most efficient way to update the research staff on new information gleaned from anomaly incursions.

He wanted so much to have the time to talk with Nick, to try to get things straightened out, but that wasn't going to happen: Lester announced that there was a new anomaly at a shopping mall.

Same-old, same-old, now with added stress.

* * *

Abby caught his eye as they left the mall carpark. She spoke in an undertone. "I used to think the world of you, Stephen. Not so much, now. " She went to the back of the vehicle to unload the weapons, intent on business only. Nothing personal.

All he could do was shake his head and let it go. They had bigger things to deal with; sorting out his friendship with Abby had to wait. He watched her move away from him to walk next to Connor.

And Nick moved on ahead without waiting for him. Seemed that there was naught but personal stuff today. He ran a step or two to catch up.

It was difficult to think of the man next to him as Nick, his friend, beside whom he had worked, and wept, and argued, and stood fast against every trouble for so long. If anything, he seemed far more like the difficult and brilliant Professor Cutter of whom everyone had stood in awe at the University, who had seemed impossible for anyone to get close to before Helen Farquhar came along.

Was that what going through the anomaly did to a person? Helen had been changed into someone entirely different. Was that happening to Nick, too? Was simply going through an anomaly and back a data point he needed to consider? Or was he missing something else?

The anomaly had closed and reopened.

What did that mean?

* * *

Raptor. Two meters high, three to four meters long, perfect killing machine.

Wonderful.

Connor was delighted, but Connor didn't have to try to shoot the thing.

Did the bloody gun have to jam when Cutter should have been shooting the raptor to keep it from killing him?

Oh, great, now he was suspecting Cutter of wanting him dead because of the Helen whom he knew wasn't his Helen, not that he could explain it to anyone at the moment. And not that anyone who was there in the mall would either listen or care. They were all too busy trying to track down a family of raptors.

This was going to be a day for the history books, if they all survived it.

He rested his eyes on Cutter's back as they moved through the mall. Where Nick had been more laid back, Cutter was on alert, as if he had to defend himself against everything including the people around him. Connor, watching Cutter, was almost quiet. Abby, next to him, alternated between watching Cutter with concern and himself with anger.

He had to ask Cutter if he felt all right. Cutter's razor-edged stare in return took him aback. Oh, yes, this was the one and only Professor Cutter indeed, keeping his resentment and anger at a slow boil under pressure. "If I wanted you dead, I'd shoot you myself." Well, Cutter always had said what he thought, though this was less than comforting at the moment.

But more data points kept ticking off in his mind, as if some shadowed part of his brain were conducting its own scientific study while the rest of it was intent on keeping him alive. One of the data points, an outlier, was Cutter's fierce resentment toward him for sleeping with Helen. This made no sense at all, considering their history together; if anything, Nick had been the most laid-back man he'd ever met about what his wife chose to do with herself. Nor did Cutter's insistence that Helen had disappeared eight years ago match what Stephen and everyone at the ARC knew to be true – that Helen had disappeared six years ago and returned a little less than two years ago.

Could both timetables be correct? Only if there were more than one timeline, with different sets of people.

Another outlier: Cutter wanted the raptor – or raptors – kept alive to be sent back through their anomaly, in case the raptors' death in their world would change things that would make people disappear. Cutter's insistence made Lester's recent sarcasm sound alarmingly factual. Perhaps Cutter was having some kind of breakdown. Since when had they tried to tranquilize and return dangerous reptiles? The dangerous ones were killed for the sake of public safety and their carcasses taken to the ARC for analysis. Keeping them alive at all was entirely against ARC policy; the annoying Dimetrodon had been a very young juvenile or it would never have been doctored at all.

Not that Cutter ever cared a fig for ARC policy if it got in his way. That hadn't changed.

The damned tranq gun needed an overhaul. It had jammed in Cutter's hands – well, Cutter wasn't a marksman; he didn't know how to fix it. Then it jammed in his own hands, twice. He actually kissed it when it did work, taking down the raptor only a few meters away from Cutter. If nothing else, it meant he didn't have to watch Cutter being eaten alive.

_Wouldn't that have been an end to a perfect day._

They covered the knocked-out raptor with a sheet borrowed from one of the shops and collapsed nearby on the walkway. She had enough of the drug in her to keep her out for a good few hours. Cutter was cheered enough by their catching her to make jokes about it, and about the gun.

"About the gun." Stephen paused. How do you apologize for thinking that your best friend would let you die? "I was wrong."

"Ah, never mind." Cutter fixed him with a clear gray-blue gaze, and for the moment he could almost think they were back at the University, when everyone knew where they were in the world, before anomalies and bombers. Cutter's voice was gentle. "You could have gone with Helen. You could have left, but you didn't. And right now that's all that really matters. So … just forget about the rest. " Cutter gave him a small smile that felt like a gift.

"You think she'll be back?" He had to ask it.

"You mean, do I think she's through messing with us? I seriously doubt it. Helen never handled rejection particularly well." Cutter raised his eyebrows. "I'm sure you noticed that."

The smile that came to his lips felt more like a smirk, but Cutter didn't seem to take it badly. They were still alive, both of them, and so was everyone else on the team. It felt like a win to him.

* * *

He would have been happy to continue sedating the baby raptor, but using it as bait to draw the other adult made sense – the thing barked like a lost seal pup – until the other adult decided on a late lunch. That took him aback, when he should have been lining up the shot. Then he and Cutter both shot, and hit it, and it kept going.

The unholy back of his mind kept thinking of battery commercials on the telly. But as far as he was concerned, anything that took two doses of tranquilizer and still kept going needed something more permanent than a dart gun to put it down – even though Cutter kept saying it needed to be put back through the anomaly alive.

_Damn, Cutter. You may have a death wish, but I don't._

"They're too dangerous." He was already getting out the rifle with the laser scope.  
"We can't keep taking stupid risks." But Cutter was getting ready to splutter at him, so he tried to be calming. "We've killed creatures before and nothing's happened."

"How do you know that for sure?"

Great, now they were back to first-year Professor Cutter again.

It had been a hell of a long day, on any side of the anomaly. He was starting to lose it. "Look, maybe the strain of going through the anomalies has got to you. Maybe you only think these changes took place."

And Cutter snapped back, "What, do you think I dreamed Claudia Brown?"

For all he knew, Cutter could have dreamed anything these past few years. He didn't think any of them had kept up with University hirings and firings since the ARC had taken them over; maybe there was someone named Claudia Brown over there and Cutter was just confused.

But it was all getting on his nerves.

"The whole pattern of evolution changes, but just one person disappears, one person who happens to be a friend of yours."

Not to mention the multiple Helens, but he wasn't going near that now.

"No, it's not that simple." Oh, great, now Cutter was trying to be reasonable. "The ARC didn't even exist before I left, there's a whole team of people in there I've never even met. There may be countless other things, big and small, I don't know yet."

This was reasonable? He picked up the rifle. "Look, I'll only use it if I have to."

* * *

The next hour felt surreal. He and Cutter borrowed motorbikes and raced them at speed through the mall's carpark, playing tag with the annoyed raptor. It was a good thing the reptile only went after them, ignoring the teenaged boys who had been hanging out there over on the side. He had slung the rifle over his back, to get it out of the way. At one point he started to feel as if he and Cutter were just having too much fun – and then the raptor vaulted over him, scraping its claws across his back as he sped away.

It went after Cutter next, following him back into the mall, trying to split them up. Raptors were pack animals, from what was known, but they weren't averse to splitting a potential meal off from its fellows and then going back for another.

Not unlike Helen's recent behavior, for that matter.

The rifle seemed to be slipping off his back as he rounded a corner; he sped up and ditched the bike near the elevator next to Cutter's. And then the strap, sliced by the raptor's claws, broke and the gun fell off his back, and he only had time to run into the elevator with Nick before the raptor caught up with them.

They got out one floor up. Only then did it hit him that he was unarmed, that Nick was unarmed and would have been depending on him to shoot. Only then, when the raptor jumped up over the edge of the railing onto the floor ten meters away, eight meters, close enough to leap onto either of them, and neither of them armed.

And then Connor ran in, pistol outreached, and plugged the raptor with a third tranquilizer dart. It wobbled, swayed and fell at their feet in a collapse that could only have been bettered by a silent movie queen.

His legs went out from underneath him. Cutter all but collapsed on Connor's shoulder. Connor, for his part, was grinning widely, so proud of himself for taking down the raptor and saving them.

Maybe his hints to Connor about practicing down at the range under the ARC were paying off.

* * *

Cutter had to be exhausted – certainly the rest of them weren't at their best – but did much of the heavy work of making sure the two adult raptors, heavily tranquilized, stayed on the cart so they could be sent back through the anomaly. It seemed like too much effort to avoid the butterfly paradox. Raptors had been the top creatures of their times for millions of years; the life or death of two individuals wasn't going to make a difference several geological eras later. But Cutter was adamant, so the rest of them exchanged knowing glances and shut up to do the work.

Abby was awake but not moving too quickly; Connor's badly aimed tranquillizer shot had hit a painful place in the muscle, and she winced every time she moved. But she was back talking to Connor, and, more important, she wasn't ignoring Stephen as she had earlier.

Connor finished checking the raptors for the fourth time, stood and crossed his arms. "So, guys, let me get this straight. All we have to do is drag two of the angriest creatures in the known universe through a hole in time, back into an ancient world where we don't know what's waiting on the other side for us."

"When you put it like that, it sounds so easy." Stephen felt uneasy about the whole thing. He had recovered the rifle from the mall; the strap had been sliced diagonally, so that it had only been held together by a few threads until he ditched the bike. He was keeping the rifle at hand now, regardless of what Cutter wanted.

Cutter shook his head. "I'm going to do this on my own."

Abby and Connor bickered for a moment about coming along to help, while Stephen stared at Cutter, his unease confirmed.

_No fucking way, Cutter._

This was so wrong, but he knew if he said anything then it would just turn into another argument with Professor Cutter, and he'd seldom won those.

"Look, I'm going to do this on my own, and I don't want any arguments," Cutter said, as if the whole matter were settled just because he said it was.

Abby glanced up at Stephen and gave him a tiny head shake, then pinned a sideward look on Connor. Stephen agreed. Cutter wasn't going to go anywhere on his own, not if they had anything to say about it.

But Cutter, who was usually more sensitive to the existence of others' views, whether he agreed or not, had drawn Connor aside to ask about the stability of the anomaly. Connor, correctly reading Abby's high sign, hesitated to give him a straight answer. "You know, it's so hard to say. Ninety percent of the anomalies are gone within hours. This one's been here most of the night already."

Cutter told Connor to go with him, and they left at a fast walk.

"Stephen." Abby had been watching Cutter; she turned the full force of her blue gaze upon him. " I'm still not happy about what you did, but ultimately it's not my business. And Cutter is our business. We need him." Abby shook her hair out of her eyes. "We can't let him go off like this. You saw him. He's not going to come back. He'll try to 'fix' things to bring back this woman we've never heard of."

"What do you want me to do, tie him down?" he retorted.

"If you have to. Knock him out. Tranq him. Do something!"

But when Cutter returned, Abby turned away to ask Cutter about Claudia Brown. Her questions disarmed him, brought him down from the harsh level at which he'd been reacting to them.

_She's making him remember there are others at stake here – all of us. How many more of us is he willing to lose to get back what he says he had?_

Connor hurried back, carrying a radio, and plugged it into the wall socket. The radio was tuned to some station that had horrible interference, like the sound of waves. Cutter nodded to him and then turned to the rest of them.

"These two won't be asleep for much longer. Okay. This is as far as you go," Cutter said.

They watched Cutter go through into the anomaly with the raptors, with the unreliable tranq gun, and his jacket -- nothing else. No food, no equipment, no supplies, no water. But Cutter had the expression of a man setting out on a journey, for all that he told them he'd be back.

"He was in love with this Claudia Brown," Abby said, despair in her voice, "and he's going after her. He's not coming back. You saw him."

Stephen put his hand on Connor's shoulder. "Keep it open as long as you can." And he was through the anomaly, feeling the nearly insubstantial touch of those swirling bits of light that fractured time and space. If going through anomalies made a person different, well, he would chance it. He'd been through a dozen in the past; this couldn't be any worse.

He saw Cutter skid the cart to a stop with his heels on the rocky slope, and cut the ropes binding the raptors – which made little sense, since they had teeth perfectly suited to doing it themselves. The land was high desert, gritty soil with chunks of pale rock in it and only a few bits of low-lying greenery. It was a perfect place for raptors to see for long distances and a lousy place for prey to hide.

Cutter would be prey, as soon as the raptors were awake again, and defenseless; he had already dropped the tranq rifle somewhere, for all the good it would do against two adult raptors.

And of course he himself had walked blithely through the anomaly without survival gear, for the only time in his life. The survival gear was back in his car at the ARC, and in the Range Rover in the carpark. There was no time to get back there for it.

He watched Cutter looking at the anomaly, and the horizon, and turn his back on the anomaly.

It didn't matter if this was the man who'd left them less a day ago or another man of the same name who had come from somewhere else. This Cutter still had the same knowledge of prehistoric creatures, the same concern for the people he worked with. It didn't matter that there was a huge gap now in their shared experience. This was still his friend, and his friend was heading off into the desert to die.

He followed Cutter, skidding his feet until his footsteps could be heard. "Yeah. Thought you might try something like this, so I followed you through. Just in case you had some crazy idea about not coming back."

Cutter never was good at lying. "I have no idea what you're talking about," he tried, but abandoned the attempt. "All right, I know exactly what you're talking about, but so what, maybe it's for the best."

"What? Dying out here in this godforsaken place?" The sun was beating down on them both, heating him up inside his old leather jacket. He felt sweat running down his spine, sticking his skin to his shirt.

"Look, I figure if I travel through enough anomalies, then maybe I can fix it, maybe I can change things back the way they were."

_Was it that good, where you were? Was I there?_

"What if there's no way back? What if this world is the only one there is? I mean, look –" he waved at the barren land, "it's suicide."

"Now, look, I don't wanna die, Stephen. I just want to try and make things right." Cutter's Scots burr was growing thick again.

Emotion would not sway Cutter. He switched to the rationality and challenge of science. Offered a challenge, Cutter would not refuse to consider it.

"Okay, let's suppose you do change things. How do you know that this time round we're not all just gonna get wiped out?"

"I don't."

He went for it, truth and unprovable lie wrapped in a hypothesis. It didn't matter that he was lying to Cutter if it would save his life. "You could change a million things and still not get Claudia back. All you know is what's happening right here, right now. Now, for once in your life, forget about the past, cause you've got a job to do."

And Cutter paused, and gave in. "You're right." Pause. "Just don't overdo it, you know, you haven't been right for a while."

Then the sound of clawed feet on stone, downhill, not far enough away, and they were running back up the stony hillside, slipping, skidding, turning to see that the raptors were gone from the cart. He fell behind, hearing the panting reptile growling behind him. Cutter went through the anomaly, and as he threw himself forward into a dive to follow the raptor grabbed his foot.

He screamed. He didn't know what he was saying; he didn't care. Long teeth punctured both sides of his foot through his heavy boots; he kicked back with his other foot but the growling beast wouldn't let go. Instead, it tried to drag him backward, yanking him with strong sideward jerks of its head, pulling him into the past.

It took all three of them to pull him out as the raptor savaged his good leather boot, and its teeth sank in at his ankle – until they let go, suddenly, as the severed head fell to the floor. The anomaly had killed it when they could not.

The Jurassic was going to be short three raptors. So much for changing the fabric of time.

He leaned on Cutter, getting his balance back, and Cutter let him.

* * *

Abby took him back to the infirmary at the ARC. "You know, I'm still not chuffed about it all, but you got Cutter to come back."

"I had to."

"So I figure, who you sleep with isn't my business, okay? Just … not Helen again."

"Honestly," he told her, "I'd rather sleep with the raptor."

"Like there's a difference?"

He turned his face toward the window and let his thoughts take him away from the pain in his leg as Abby drove.

The Helen who had left early that morning with Nick was not the same Helen whom he'd known at the University; that one thing he knew for certain. The Helen who had returned two years ago had to have come from somewhere, and there was no reason to assume that the anomaly had invented a third Helen and swapped her for the one who had left with Nick. So, the only logical explanation was that there had to be another universe that could be reached via the anomalies, a parallel universe in which most things were the same, but not all. Not all Helens were both intelligent and kind; not all Helens had a triangle of moles.

That meant the anomalies didn't just move back and forth in time within any one universe, but through time and into other universes. If one other universe could be posited, then so could a multitude of them.

Not just one other Helen, but a multitude of them.

He shivered involuntarily, visualizing a squadron of Helens, all of them with the hostile expression he'd seen that morning.

"You okay? Want me to turn up the heat?" Abby pressed the buttons on the dash. "It's a bit chilly in here."

"'m okay," he said, but he pulled his jacket closer around himself. She gave him a wary sideward glance and stepped on the gas.

Go with it – suppose there's a parallel Britain that could be reached, and another Professor Nick Cutter with the same interests and credentials. Maybe, just maybe, a different Nick Cutter had come back to them than the one who had left -- a Nick Cutter who knew someone named Claudia Brown and who had not been on good terms with Helen. A Nick Cutter whose Helen had always been the one who had come back with him today through the anomaly.

He couldn't imagine lying in the big bed upstairs at the house next to this one.

Helen knew more than she was saying, but this Helen always did. His own Helen had always been willing to share what she knew or what she supposed, and he had happy memories of long discussions with her and Nick over the kitchen table after dinner.

If Cutter were correct and the world he was in was not the one he'd left, either, then one of two things had to be happening: either something had changed in the past that altered the universe, brought about the ARC and eliminated the absent Claudia Brown, or Cutter had come here from the other universe without realizing it.

Which meant this could well be different Nick Cutter, one on whom the false Helen had played some sort of trick – as witnessed by everyone when she had outed their brief encounters for her own purposes.

He felt so relieved that the false Helen was out of his life; he couldn't think of her as anything but a fake. But it raised another question: what should he do about this Nick, who was not in his own universe, regardless of how he'd gotten here?

* * *

He was glad to see that Dr. Beaudrick was on duty at the ARC infirmary. Beaudrick was well aware that he wasn't going to be seeing the same kind of injuries as most other doctors in the world, and had treated him before.

"Well, what is it this time?" Beaudrick pulled on a pair of examination gloves.

"Dinosaur tried to take my foot off." He gripped the exam table as the doctor sliced his boot off. It was intensely painful, and he felt Abby's hand patting his shoulder as a distraction. Maybe she had forgiven him.

"Oh, very nice. You can thank your bootmaker; the sole of this was tough enough that it saved your foot." Beaudrick held up the boot, which showed clear puncture marks through the leather on either side of the sole but only a slight bend in the sole itself. "I don't suppose we've got any way to know whether it had a poisonous bite?"

"You could check." Stephen handed him a bag. "Careful, the teeth are sharp."

"Ah. Excellent. Now if I had something like this every time, my work would be so much easier. Merrill! Would you test the teeth on this head, see if they're poisonous or merely filthy?"

"I assume this is going over to Biology when we're done with it?" Merrill asked. Both Stephen and Abby nodded. "Um. What is it?"

"Theropod raptor." Abby said. "Just like in the movies." She raised an eyebrow at Merrill, who appeared a bit stunned.

"Ahem. Yes. Wonderful. Thank you." And he held the bag out ahead of him, as if it might wake up and bite through the plastic as he went to the lab.

"You think I can bill the ARC for the replacement pair?" he asked, in an attempt at small talk.

"I wouldn't be surprised. Sacrificed in the line of duty, and all that. Ah. Yes. You're going to have a few stitches here, but it's far better than I expected. However, you're also going to be getting a tetanus booster and a few other things that I've found useful." Beaudrick busied himself at the counter. "Ah, Merrill. Good. What have you found?"

"Absolutely filthy, but not poisonous. Unless you need the head for anything else, I can call the paleo people to pick it up."

"Good, good. In that case, Stephen, you're going to be getting the combination shot that's been devised for people who are bitten by komodo dragons and similar creatures." Beaudrick administered the injection, with a needle that felt like another raptor's tooth, and patted the injection site. "Now, if you have any adverse reactions at all you must let me know immediately. And I'd strongly suggest you have someone else drive you home, or else stay here in the military quarters tonight."

"Aren't we all paleo people?" Abby asked. "We all deal with dinosaurs."

"It'll go to the anatomists first, then the others will have their chance at it," Merrill said. "I expect there'll be quite a fight over it. Not every day someone gets to play with a raptor's head, is it?"

"I'd prefer not to do it again," he said. "I'm not into that kind of thrills."

Beaudrick handed him a packet of pills. "Don't overdo it, by which I mean stick to the schedule on the painkillers. They should be adequate for the kind of life you lead."

Stephen raised his eyebrows, but Beaudrick lowered his. "If I screw up…"

"It's cold turkey, and you won't like it a bit, trust me. If they don't do the job, let me know and I'll give you something else."

He had to be satisfied with that.

* * *

When they left the infirmary, Abby asked, "Home or here?"

He felt woozy and exhausted, and the thought of the stairs at the flat made him wince. "Here."

"Okay." Abby walked with him down to the small suite of spare rooms in the military quarters that was available to any ARC employee who had to work late, and waited while he registered with the duty guard who oversaw them. "Do you have any clothes here for tomorrow? I can run by your flat if you like."

"You're being awfully nice to someone you're mad at," he said, leaning on the doorframe of the bedroom with attached bath, to which he'd been assigned.

"You're team. And you brought Cutter back." She blinked back tears. "It's been such a fucking long day, you know."

"Hey, hey." He gathered her in under the arm that wasn't holding him up and held her as she struggled to get the tears under control. "It's been a sucky day all around."

"Yeah, for you more than others." She looked up at him from his wet shirt. "I'm sorry."

"So am I." He patted her back and she stepped away, shaking back her hair as she got her emotions under control.

"So. Clothes?"

He handed her his keys. "There should be a bag in the front hall closet with a change of clothes; I usually keep it in the boot but I had to do laundry. Get stuff out of the clothes press if it's empty; it's not like I have any secrets any more."

"Enough of that. I did forgive you, whether you were noticing or not." She took the keys, kissed him on the cheek, and left. He closed the door, hobbled to the bed, set the alarm for 8 a.m. and collapsed.

* * *

He must have slept at some point, but his mind whirled, replaying the last few days, the last few years. Somewhere in the darkness of the small bedroom the things he'd observed all along became syllogisms, and then broke down to simple hypotheses, as if he had to be a logical scientist to the end of the world, even when recovering from a dinosaur bite.

The Helen Cutter who left had the triangular moles. The Helen Cutter who came back did not have them, and had no evidence of having them removed. Therefore, the Helen Cutter who returned wasn't the one who had left six years ago.

The Helen Cutter who came back here did not come from here. She had to have come from somewhere. So there had to be a place on the other side of the anomaly from which that Helen Cutter could have come.

And, since the known places on the other sides of anomalies went only to other time periods and geological eras, and since there were no universities at those times, there had to be a place where that Helen Cutter could have gotten her education. She had to have come from a time and a society equivalent to his own.

Conclusion: Anomalies don't just cut across time but across adjacent universes, parallel universes that would be separate except for the anomalies, and that may be very similar to the immediate world.

Conclusion: People can travel across universes.

Conclusion: Helen Cutter came back from a parallel universe.

Conclusion: If there can be more than one Helen, there can be more than one Nick Cutter.

If this wasn't the Nick Cutter whom he had known for so long, then the Nick Cutter he knew must still be out there, somewhere, going through anomalies, trying to get back. But he had some equipment, thanks to Abby and Connor. He hadn't been sent into the unknown completely unarmed. The odds were horrible, but it was within possibility that he might see Nick again someday.

And as he finally fell deeply asleep he realized that the conclusions he had drawn were exactly the opposite of the arguments he'd used to bring Cutter back with him from the Jurassic.

Maybe, if they had the chance to sit and talk, the two of them could sort things out.

* * *

He got through the next week on painkillers, adrenalin and coffee. All the way through, he kept watching Cutter for clues on how to proceed, what shape their friendship might take now. Cutter was still having Claudia Brown problems, and had reacted poorly to the presence of Jenny Lewis, whom he insisted was actually Claudia Brown. If Connor hadn't intervened, things could have gotten very ugly with Lester. As it was, Connor must have persuaded Cutter to smooth things over, because Jenny was civil to him instead of cutting him cold.

There weren't any anomalies to chase, so no reason to go outside the ARC. Lester had taken one look at the destroyed boot and had signed authorization for a replacement pair, which he would break in by walking around indoors once the swelling in his foot had completely subsided. Connor was building his radio-frequency anomaly detector, and was so focused that any time someone came in he would ask the newcomer to hold some piece of equipment while he made adjustments and said "hmmm?" Abby was spending time at the Wellington Zoo consulting about the condition of a clutch of salamanders whose population was declining.

"How do you know what normal salamander behavior is?" Cutter asked her as she put on her jacket, after the zookeeper had called her.

"Well, they're not usually that cannibalistic. That is, they are if they're overpopulated and in too small of an area, but that's not the case here." She frowned. "But it'd be easier all 'round if it were just Ophelia the alligator lizard getting notions again."

"Ophelia the alligator lizard?" Cutter repeated, his expression closer to a grin than Stephen had seen since the anomaly until he caught Stephen's own smile. Cutter's face went back to neutral. Not angry, not irritated, not happy or unhappy, just neutral.

"Oh yeah." Abby closed her locker. "She ate Hamlet for breakfast one day. We know what to expect from her, but the salamanders are new to the zoo. Not quite reptiles; I'm branching out a bit." She gave Cutter a sunny smile and went out.

He turned his back to the locker room and limped over to get another cup of coffee. He was moving slowly, but the pain was down to a moderate ache, and he was wearing the new boots. Lester had asked him to go out and check a few places in the Forest of Dean in the afternoon, but not to overdo it, and he planned to go after he finished reviewing the results of the lab tests on the raptor head. There was something satisfying about being alive to read about the dissection of the head of the creature that had tried to kill him.

* * *

The Forest of Dean was quiet. No new animals, no out-of-place tracks or sounds. He parked near the Long Stone and took the same path he'd taken with Abby, but more slowly, comforted by the constant sounds of birds that indicated nothing unusual or malign in the forest.

When he came to the tree where Helen's supply cache had been hidden, he threw a rope up over a limb, climbed up to it, and did it again until he was looking into the hollow in the trunk. It was empty, as he'd expected.

The selkie had taken her skin back, leaving nothing in its place, not a seashell or an ammonite, or even a scrap of cloth. With any luck, she'd be out there swimming the tides of time, and never come to their little cove again. The more he thought of her as a selkie, the more it made sense, though if his fancy were true she'd be a leopard seal with a mouth full of sharp teeth, not one of the quiet and peaceable brown seals he'd seen along the coasts of Scotland.

He made one more stop in the Forest that day, beyond the ones on his official agenda. This one was at the tree by the river, where he and Helen had spent the night. He climbed up to the place they'd shared, and sat for a while looking at the water flowing past. A roe buck came down to drink and went away, unmolested.

He left as the sun was setting, as the light fell into the hollow just enough to show what he'd carved there.  


  
_HC, 1967-2003._  
Beloved friend.  


  


* * *

The knock on the door that night startled him. Who would be visiting at 9:30 on a Friday? He limped down to the door; he had overdone it on the hill a little, but he didn't regret it.

"May I come in?" Cutter asked. Rain was pouring down like a waterfall. "I'm fair drowned out here."

"Sure." He hung Cutter's coat over the railing at the bottom of the stairs, and found a towel for his wet hair while Cutter took off his shoes. When Cutter came up the stairs he handed him a beer and the two of them went into the living room, Cutter glancing all around as if it were all new to him.

"I – I thought we should talk, some time that's not an emergency. About Helen. About you and me."

"Nick Cutter talk about his feelings?" Stephen took the armchair that shared an end table with the couch and put his sore foot up to rest on the cushioned foot stool. Having the bottle in his hands and taking a drink kept him from having to do anything more than react for now.

Cutter's mouth twisted, but he settled on one end of the couch. "Not exactly. More about time and place and so on."

Stephen took a drink, feeling the beer trickle slowly down his throat. "You were talking about changes in the Permian causing the differences here."

"Aye. Helen must have lied, or been mistaken. I didn't count the bodies of the predator kits; some must have survived."

"And the probability of those two infant predators causing a change in the present time is so close to zero that it's incalculable, even for Connor." Stephen set his beer bottle emphatically on a coaster. "You know that creatures that intelligent, who require a long period of parental care, wouldn't survive being orphaned in a hostile world. They don't know how to survive. Besides, the worldwide biological collapse at the end of the era wiped the slate clean." His foot twinged, and he winced and moved it until it stopped. Another hour, another pain pill. "You know this; you taught it to me. There were barely protein molecules or protozoans left afterward."

"I know. I know. But what else could it be?" Cutter stared out the window at the driving rain, washing down the glass. "Everything feels strange to me here, even my own house. I don't even know the faces on the money."

He waited until he had Cutter's attention again. "There's another possibility."

"What?"

"Call it a hypothesis for now, with some data." He took a drink. "Suppose the anomalies don't just cut through time, but across universes. Suppose that your universe, where you grew up, is over there," he pointed toward the kitchen, "but the Helen in that universe found a way to go through from yours to mine. There could be any number of alternate universes, divided by various historical events that may have nothing at all to do with the Permian Era."

"Historical events?" Cutter's full focus was on him now.

Deep breath. It still wasn't easy to talk about.

"Six years ago, in June, some dissidents blew up the Queen's garden party at Buckingham Palace. Killed most of the royal family. Killed my sister and her fiancé, who were there at the time. Killed the PM and the Home Secretary and a lot of others. Lester found the bombers within a week, and the new Queen knighted him, and gave him charge over certain internal security matters. That's how we got the ARC. It's Lester's project, but some if not all of the money comes from the Queen's own pocketbook."

Cutter took a pound note out of his pocket and looked at it. "Definitely not good old Lizzie. Who is it now?"

"Zara Philips, the old queen's granddaughter. She's the only one who wasn't at the party."

"So the military that I see around, and the way some things are there, or not there …"

"A lot of changes. All university-government research was nationalized and put under government authority. That's the other part of what Lester oversees. He could have been PM if he wanted, but he turned it down."

"And you know this how?"

"He talks to me a bit, at times. And some of it gets into the news."

"I'm sorry about your sister," Cutter said.

"You came to the funeral with me, up in Scotland."

Cutter took another long swig of beer, as if it would clear his head. It didn't seem to help. "What else?"

"You're not going to like this bit."

Cutter grimaced. "I haven't liked much since I got here."

He swallowed hard. "Here, our Helen left six years ago, not eight. She was chased into an anomaly by a gorgonopsid, and the anomaly closed behind her." The rain was still pouring down the windows, washing the world. "I don't believe that's the same woman who came back through to here two years ago. There are too many differences."

"Our Helen?"

Trust Cutter, this version of Cutter, to pick up that one thing.

He nodded.

"And how did the Nick Cutter who was here feel about this?"

"You – he -- told me you didn't care what happened as long as she came home safe." The pronouns were going to kill him, or drive him crazy. "And you nearly killed yourself with drink when she didn't. I lived with you over at the house for months, both then and after Veronica died. We took care of each other." He let himself smile a little. "Well, not quite like that. You turned me down."

Cutter shook his head. "Y'know, that I would have remembered." He smiled suddenly, shedding the grimness he'd worn. "That makes more sense of something Connor said when I got to the ARC that morning."

"Oh?"

"He said he believed me about the past changing and I told him I could kiss him for it. And he said it would be better to wait until nobody was watching." Cutter waved a hand. "Not important. So, what you're saying is that this is a different universe, and I'm not the same Nick Cutter, and your Nick Cutter and Helen Cutter are separately wandering around somewhere among the anomalies." He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Prove it."

"You want me to prove a negative?"

"Show your work. Give me some data points. Tell me something that proves there's another Nick Cutter."

University was back in session. He thought a moment. "Turn out your pockets."

"What?"

"Nick Cutter carries the same things in his pockets every day. Show me what's in yours."

Cutter shrugged, put down his beer, and stood to empty his pockets onto the table. A cloth handkerchief, not unfolded since it had been ironed. A few coins, a single-bladed pocket knife whose blade might be 5 cm long, a strip of antacid pills in blister pack, a pencil, a small notepad, a mobile. "So?

"Abby and Connor gave you things that morning, before you went through the anomaly with the predator kits. I saw them. Connor gave you the smaller versions of some of our equipment – an anomaly detector, an oscilloscope – as well as one of those Swiss Army knives with all sorts of attachments. Abby gave you a packet with a multitool and some other things, a little survival kit. Neither of them trusted Helen; they wanted to make sure you wouldn't be entirely without resources in the Permian."

Cutter's jaw dropped a little, and he sat down slowly. "I've never owned a Swiss Army knife in my life. I don't know what to think."

"I think I'll get another beer."

By the time he came back with another bottle for Cutter, Cutter was up on his feet again, pacing. He substituted the full bottle for Cutter's empty, and settled back into the armchair again to watch Cutter think his way through the maze he was walking between the dining room and the window. "Would it help any if you told me what you remember of events? You said Helen left you eight years ago?"

Cutter nodded. "I was devastated, but I got over it. It took a while." He drank from the bottle and set it down on the table, while he kept pacing. "She showed up again a year after she'd been declared legally dead, and when she did she made it clear that she'd no intention of coming back to me or the University. She wanted me to leave my life behind and go with her."

"What year did she disappear?"

Cutter named a year.

He shook his head. "That's the year you and Helen were married here. I was your best man. Helen's sister Carlotta was maid of honor."

"Helen's sister who?"

He felt his eyebrows go up. "Carlotta. Works in a travel agency that makes arrangements for royals; that's how our Helen met Zara, years back."

"Whereas my Helen despised the royals and never met any, not since I've known her, which goes back near 15 years. We met in the last year of undergrad."

"No wonder she didn't want to talk to Carlotta."

Cutter shook his head. "I'd have loved to see that conversation. Helen doesn't have a sister named Carlotta; she was an only child raised by her great-aunt after her parents died in a car crash." Cutter came to a stop, his hands leaning on the back of a dining-room chair. "Stephen, when we were in the Permian, you told me to consider that this was the only time there is, and that I could ruin it all by traveling but I still had my work to do. But now you're saying this isn't the only time and place. Which is it?"

"Nick." He used the name deliberately. "I had to get you back. I couldn't let you die out there." He felt emotion thickening his voice. "I didn't want to lose everyone I cared about."

The only sound was the rain, still wind-tossed against the windows.

Cutter sat down on a dining room chair, across the room. "Even if I'm not your Nick?"

"Even if." He raised his head from peering at the label on the beer bottle to look directly at Cutter, who sat like a statue with his hands open on the table. "You're still the Nick Cutter who's here."

Cutter muttered something inaudible about notifying Stephen Stills, which he ignored since the only Stephen Stills he'd ever heard of was an aging folk-rock guitarist who sang at the Old Firehall in Glasgow on occasional Fridays.

The rain pelted down more strongly, and a flash of lightning flickered in the distance, followed by a dull boom.

"Y'know, this is a little like the arguments for and against reincarnation – it's not where you've been, it's what you do with where you are now," Cutter said eventually. "And where I am now is here."

"So?"

"I'm not going to say I believe you outright. I'm going to need some evidence, some proof."

"Such as?"

"Don't know. But we'll test this hypothesis, see what happens." Cutter shrugged. "And deal with anomalies while we do it."

He nodded an affirmative to Cutter and drained his beer.

"One thing, I'd like to ask..."

"What's that?"

"You haven't called me Nick until a little while ago, and I miss it. Would it be possible for you to call me it again? I mean, we're friends, right?"

For the first time in ten days, Stephen felt himself relax. "In all the universes there are, Nick."

* * *

  


  


> Two loves have I of comfort and despair  
>  Which like two spirits do suggest me still:  
>  The better angel is a man right fair,  
>  The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.  
>  To win me soon to hell, my female evil  
>  Tempteth my better angel from my side,  
>  And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,  
>  Wooing his purity with her foul pride.  
>  And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend  
>  Suspect I may, but not directly tell;  
>  But being both from me, both to each friend,  
>  I guess one angel in another's hell:  
>  Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt  
>  Till my bad angel fire my good one out.
> 
> \-- Shakespeare, Sonnet 144  
> 

  


**Author's Note:**

> I am profoundly grateful to the beta readers and Britpickers, without whom this would have been an inexact mess: silicon shaman, writerlibrarian, neotoma, blktauna, alyse, clanwilliam, zana16.
> 
> This story takes certain liberties with the geography and history of Britain (and Europe, as well) but in my defense I will point out that this is not the Britain you know, but the ARC-Universe, through the anomalous looking-glass, so to speak. Also, I have borrowed the words of a conversation many years ago with one of the Marines who liberated an international group of nurses who had been held in primitive conditions in a Japanese detainment camp during World War II and transformed them into quotes from a nonexistent study; for the sake of confidentiality I will not attributed the quotations further than that.
> 
> Regardless of alterations, any errors remaining are mine. I don't own Primeval or its characters, unfortunately, but any and all alternate universes are mine.


End file.
